President Bush, yesterday: “Now, many critics compare the battle in Iraq to the situation we faced in Vietnam. There are many differences between those two conflicts, but one stands out above all: The enemy in Vietnam had neither the intent nor the capability to strike our homeland. The enemy in Iraq does.”

There are so many problems and distortions with this statement that it is difficult to know where to start. But here’s one place. Can we review the main arguments for why we were in Vietnam? Or at least try to distinguish them from the ones for getting out?

President Bush appears to be embracing the argument that the Vietnam War was a fight against Vietnamese nationalists who wanted to kick us out of Vietnam but had no interest in us one way or another beyond that. Certainly they weren’t going to launch attacks against the US mainland. But that was the Doves’ argument. The premise of the war was that it was a battleground in the larger Cold War struggle, one against the Soviets (who certainly had the ability and arguably had the intent to attack us), the Chinese (though that’s much more complicated) and international communism generally.

In any case, the arguments for staying in Vietnam and staying in Iraq are actually quite similar — and the arguments for leaving actually have a degree of parallelism too.

Of course, if we’re worried about armed jihadism, which we certainly should be, it’s really difficult to think of a better way to exacerbate the problem than to permanently occupy a country at the literal and figurative heart of the Muslim and Arab worlds.

Our readers are truly a wonderful thing.

Apropos of the previous post about Iraq and Vietnam, here’s a passage TPM Reader KS sent along. It’s a tape of a conversation between LBJ and McGeorge Bundy about Vietnam back on May 27th, 1964 …

Johnson: And we just got to think about it. I’m looking at this Sergeant of mine this morning and he’s got 6 little old kids over there, and he’s getting out my things, and bringing me in my night reading, and all that kind of stuff, and I just thought about ordering all those kids in there. And what in the hell am I ordering them out there for? What in the hell is Vietnam worth to me? What is Laos worth to me? What is it worth to this country? We’ve got a treaty but hell, everybody else has got a treaty out there, and they’re not doing a thing about it.

Bundy: Yeah, yeah.

Johnson: Of course, if you start running from the Communists, they may just chase you right into your own kitchen.

Bundy: Yeah, that’s the trouble. And that is what the rest of that half of the world is going to think if this thing comes apart on us. That’s the dilemma, that’s exactly the dilemma.

See the whole transcript here.

Late Update: And more. I’m not as sure of the provenance of this quote as the one above. But according to a 2003 article from Knight-Ridder, LBJ also said: “If we quit Vietnam,” President Lyndon Johnson warned, “tomorrow we’ll be fighting in Hawaii, and next week we’ll have to fight in San Francisco.”

Rematch, June 7! Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) versus GSA chief Lurita “How Can We Help Our Candidates” Doan.

House passes no-timetables Iraq funding bill, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi the only member of the leadership to vote against it. That and more news of the day in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.

Hillary and Obama both vote against the no-withdrawal-timetables bill funding the Iraq War.

Today’s Must Read: the Justice Department contradicts a key part of Monica Goodling’s testimony.

A new poll finds that only 38% of Republicans are satisfied with their GOP Presidential primary choices. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Morning Roundup.

John McCain’s latest wild and wacky claim: The only people who support withdrawal timetables and enforceable benchmarks are “MoveOn and liberals.”

It’s an inspiring tale that would only be possible in the Bush administration.

How a lowly Republican aide, a rioter in the streets of Florida in 2000, rose to be an immigration judge. The politicization of the Justice Department at work.

Barack Obama blasts Romney and McCain, heaps scorn on McCain’s Baghdad Stroll.

Late Update: The battle continues.

Later Update: Drudge makes an anonymous McCain aide’s attack on Obama his lead story — with no sign of Obama’s response to McCain.