In what can only be seen as an act of desperation, President Bush has appealed to history to justify his misbegotten war. For a man who has never shown any interest in nor understanding of history, except that he once may have thought it would be fun to participate in it, his latest appeal came as a surprise.

What was not surprising was that most of his history is faulty, distorted or flat-out wrong.

The thing that caught my eye in his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention was not so much the bad history but rather this line: “[...] 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,’ ‘re-education camps’ and ‘killing fields.’”

In this matter of adding to the American language legacy, the president might have expanded his list. Vietnam, in fact, left us with may more instructive phrases than the ones he mentioned.

Such grand phrases as “light at the end of the tunnel,” or, “We are turning the corner in Vietnam,” quickly entered the vocabulary. The light, as the old joke goes, was that of an oncoming train, while we turned so many corners that we were finally spinning in circles.

More memorable was the line “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” This quaint concept became a metaphor for any number of destructive acts in the name of freedom and liberty. It also became a phrase used to describe the overall impact of the Vietnam War on the people of Vietnam and the American politicians who supported it.

More lasting was “domino theory,” which implied that a defeat for the U.S. in Vietnam would lead to a Communist victory in every corner of the world. The current president has resurrected this ill-conceived concept with his often repeated charge, “We must fight them over there, so we don?t have to fight them over here.”

Even more ubiquitous in its usage was “credibility gap,” which was first coined to characterize President Johnson’s tendency to distort, exaggerate and dissemble on nearly any subject, but came to be applied to his deceptions in Vietnam policy. This phrase proved useful across the board for all forms of these same tendencies in all walks of life.

Looking to the future, Bush?s disastrous war of choice has already added any number of phrases to our daily language. “Weapons of Mass Destruction” is now used to describe any false reason for action. “Axis of Evil” is used to describe all sorts people you don?t like.

“We will track him down, and smoke him out” can now to be used to describe any empty threat or action you do not expect to complete. “Evildoers” has taken on multiple uses.

“Coalition of the Willing” is used to describe any group that is less than willing to do something, but is coerced into doing it. It also has invited a number of variations, such as the “Coalition of the Less Than Willing.”

Don Rumsfeld?s contributions are many: “Stuff happens” and “You have to go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want” are among his best and most frequently used and paraphrased in everyday conversation. Dick Cheney?s “undisclosed location” has become a widely used euphemism for any number of occasions.

The most abused of all the phrases is: “We are living in a post-9/11 World” and its multitude of variations, such as, “That is pre-9/11 thinking.” This is often coupled with the phrase “War on Terror,? which seems to cover any number of actions that under normal circumstances would not seem moral or all that attractive.

The president needs to know that his contributions to the vocabulary of foreign policy disaster have been considerable in number and rich in symbolic content. They speak to the overall failure of his leadership as well as his administration’s misuse of language.

He has turned the “credibility gap” into a Grand Canyon of Deception. Yet it is his overuse of the benign sounding “Mistakes were made” that will be his greatest legacy to the art of understatement and callous indifference to the consequences of his actions.