Quite early on the morning of Sunday 20 November, the departure to Ho Chi Minh City of a United Airlines flight was announced in Washington's Dulles International Airport. A good number of businessmen filed on board. It was a profoundly un-newsworthy event, taking place just over thirty years after the United States had pulled out of Vietnam, tacitly (and later openly) admitting defeat. On the evening of 17 November, Republicans in the House of Representatives proposed, debated, and overwhelmingly defeated, a motion that the United States should immediately pull its troops out of Iraq. This was of course a manoeuvre by the Republican majority in the House to draw the sting from a Democrat proposal from Representative John Murtha (a much decorated Marine and war veteran) that the United States should start to withdraw troops as soon as practicable.
展开▼
