I didn’t think that Karl was out. I can’t prove it but I think that he still has his nasty little fingers in the pie.

K arl Rove may be leaving the Bush administration, but at least one aspect of Rovism — the effort to try to pivot off a perceived political liability and turn it into a strength — seems hard-wired into the White House psyche.

That could be seen in President Bush’s widely discussed speech last week drawing lessons from America’s engagement in Asia since World War II. From the beginning of the Iraq War, the White House has resisted analogies to Vietnam, apparently convinced that any association with such an unpopular venture was a political loser for the president.

When Bush was asked at a news conference in June 2006 whether he saw any parallels between Iraq and Vietnam, he replied with a simple “No.”

That posture changed markedly with Bush’s Kansas City, Mo., address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, as the president waded into the thicket of Vietnam reinterpretation. While suggesting that he did not want to re-litigate the war, Bush sought to focus the audience on what he described as the horrific consequences of the U.S. withdrawal — Vietnamese reeducation camps in which many perished and the hundreds of thousands of people murdered by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

The inference was clear: The people who think America can get out of Iraq with minimal human costs are sadly mistaken. “Whatever your position is on that debate,” Bush said, “one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people,’ ‘reeducation camps’ and ‘killing fields.’ “

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