Just how desperate do you have to be to use our experiences in Vietnam to support our policies in Iraq? Lets ask the President.

"Many argued that if we pulled out, there would be no consequences for the Vietnamese people," he was to say. "The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be."

"In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation, torture, or execution. In Vietnam, former American allies, government workers, intellectuals, and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished," he was to say.

"Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea," said Bush, who pleaded for patience with the US-led security crackdown in Iraq.

Of course anybody with any sense of history can see that this is not an argument for staying in Iraq until "the job is done", but rather an argument to not tell the people of a country you will never abandon them on Monday and then run for the border on Wednesday.

We need to start reducing the number of troops in Iraq as soon as possible, but do it in a controlled manner which does not appear that we are being chased out.

No matter if we stay or if we go, there are going to be more Iraqi casualties. And it is almost certain that the months around our pullout will see an increase in violence against the Iraqis and Americans. But it simply has to be done. Because until we leave this thing will just never end.

And we better make some considerations for the Iraqis who supported us, because they will be the first ones killed when we do leave. I don't have a good solution for this problem.

When we went in we should have known that we would cause a bloodbath. Hell we killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these people ourselves in the lead up to the war.

All of this is our fault. We have no moral ground to stand on here.