The Ungracious American

...President George W. Bush said Friday that the American experience in Vietnam contained lessons for the war in Iraq. Chief among them, he said, was that "we'll succeed unless we quit."

"We tend to want there to be instant success in the world," Bush said after a lunch with Prime Minister John Howard of Australia, "and the task in Iraq is going to take a while."

For Bush, at APEC meeting, Vietnam offers lessons on Iraq

This is what he said when visiting Vietnam - the country that won. He's a guest in this country. So, he tells them that the one lesson that he learned was that the U.S. could have kicked Vietnamese ass if the U.S. hadn't been forced by popular sentiment in the U.S. to cut and run. He didn't learn that a popular insergency was hard to defeat nor that the U.S. shouldn't have gone to war in Vietnam in the first place nor that the U.S. just shouldn't be starting wars in other countries. He's saying that not defeating the North Vietnamese was bad for the host country and the rest of the world - if the U.S. had just stuck it out a little longer, they would have "succeeded". Whether he's right or not is not the point. The Vietnamese communist government has undoubtedly held the country back. But, he's a guest in this country, talking to the communist leaders of Vietnam. They are his hosts. Does he take pleasure in being rude to everyone? Does he know how to say/spell "diplomacy"?