Iraq is not Vietnam, it is much worse. To compare the two is insulting both to Vietnamese and the Iraqis. An American president who got political connections to save him from the draft, whose campaign poured scorn on his challenger's Vietnam record, who has consistently said that he has no interest in history, now uses the comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq out of political expediency.
One of this White House's most cherished, asinine beliefs is that the media lost the war in Vietnam. TV images of young, wounded, American soldiers being airlifted from paddy fields under the whoosh of a Huey's rotating blades was too much for Americans to accept in the comforts of armchaired suburbia, they claimed. What, in actual, fact made Americans feel uncomfortable was the lies emanating from Washington. Well, this time it certainly is not the media who are losing Iraq, George. There are so few images coming from Iraq to disturb the chattering classes of the armchair set because the country is too unstable to cover....
By comparing it to Vietnam is he softening the blow of the radical change in policy that is going to occur after the November elections? And if he has lost what he described as the frontline on the war on terror is he fit to hold the office of president? There was no al-Qaida presence in Iraq prior to the invasion. There is a very real al-Qaida presence in Iraq today. The state does not exist in any meaningful form. That was never the case in Vietnam. South Vietnam collapsed but the Viet Cong were always able to implement the discipline of statehood. That was never the case in Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge took over.
There is only one comparison that can be made between Vietnam and Iraq. The hollowness of the White House in 1968 finds an echo in today's White House.===
Tom Clifford is the Assistant Editor of Gulf News in Dubai.
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