Bush Tells Vietnamese Intervention Was Right

Former U.S. President George Bush startled a roomful of senior Vietnamese officials Tuesday, candidly insisting that he still believes American military intervention in their country 30 years ago was the right course.

“I am not a revisionist,” Bush told about 125 government and business leaders - many of them veterans of the war - on the first stop of a private trip that includes visits to China and Japan. Asked to comment on former defense secretary Robert McNamara’s confession earlier this year that the U.S. was “wrong, terribly wrong” to intervene in Vietnam, Bush said: “I disagree with McNamara.”

But he added, “There is no point in me trying to convince people in this room about the rectitude of what we did. … There is no point in dwelling on the past. We must look to the future.”