Scheurer Plays the Vietnam Analogy Card

Today, Moderate (anti-war) Party 8th congressional district candidate Bill Scheurer issued the following press release today:

For IMMEDIATE RELEASE

August 22, 2006

Scheurer sees Vietnam in Bush Iraq war policy

President Bush’s press conference Monday was all too familiar to Bill Scheurer, independent Moderate Party candidate for Congress in the IL-8th District.

“For those of us who are old enough to remember, we’ve seen this all before,” Scheurer said. “We’ve put our troops in the middle of a civil war, with no end in sight and a president who insists they stay.”

Scheurer recalled the arguments in Bush’s speech as almost identical to those put forth by previous administrations during the protracted Vietnam war.

“He kept using phrases like ‘leaving before the job is done,’” Scheurer said. “The same things were said in 1965, and we wasted another eight years and countless lives, and nothing was accomplished.”

Scheurer said he believed his opponents’ support (incumbent Democrat Melissa Bean and Republican David McSweeney) for Bush’s Iraq policy might be because they were too young to remember the parallels between this war and the one in Vietnam.

“David McSweeney was 14 when Ronald Reagan was president. Melissa Bean was only 11 years old when the Vietnam War ended,” Scheurer said. “Neither one of them remembers how the war dragged on, pointlessly, taking with it 58,000 American lives, 3 million Vietnamese lives and billions of dollars in the end.”

Scheurer said that, lacking this sense of perspective, his opponents might easily be caught in the rhetoric of continuing the war.

“Bush’s contention that if we leave Iraq the terrorists ‘will follow us here’ is wrong,” Scheurer said. “Bring our troops home and secure our borders. Start focusing our military on national defense, their true mission, which Bush and his enablers in Congress (like Bean) have left undone.”

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