Likening Iraq to another Vietnam, and contrasting those who got us into Vietnam (the best and the brightest) - who the author points out had extenuating circumstances for doing so - to those in the Bush Admin. who got us into Iraq (the dumb and the dumbest) - who had absoultely none. This is a great opportunity for the right Democratic candidate to capture the votes of independents and disenchanted conservatives.
http://www.cato.org/dailys/09-20-03.htmlRecognizing that the United States is gradually sinking into a military quagmire in Iraq, analysts have applied the historical analogy of the American intervention in Vietnam.
...Indeed, as they agonise over the failure of White House and Pentagon officials to anticipate the postwar predicament in Iraq, pundits have compared the architects of the military occupation of Iraq -- including Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice and other members of the neo-conservative faction -- to the managers of US national security during the 1960s that had steered Presidents Kennedy and Johnson into Vietnam.
...it is important to stress some of the differences between those two military interventions.
First, taking place during the height of the Cold War, in which America confronted a nuclear-armed Soviet Union leading a powerful communist bloc, the decision to come to the aid of the pro-American South Vietnamese made strategic sense. After all, North Vietnam was controlled by a group of ardent communists, many of whom, including Ho Chi Minh, had been trained in the Soviet Union and China, and had strong political and military ties to those regimes.
...But contrary to some of the earlier suggestions by members of the current 'war party' in Washington, who have depicted the intervention in Iraq as an integral part of the war on terrorism, there were no ideological ties or military connection between President Saddam Hussein's Baath regime and Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network and its Taleban backers.
In short, while backing South Vietnam was clearly an integral part of the rivalry between the US and the communist bloc, ousting Saddam and invading Iraq had nothing to do with the war on terrorism. In fact, as a result of the US occupation, Iraq has become a magnet for radical Islamic terrorists... the grand designs to democratise Iraq as part of an American-led crusade for freedom in the Middle East seem to be based on nothing more than wishful thinking.
...let us not insult the Best and the Brightest of the 1960s with those who accused Saddam of supporting Osama, who had promised to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, and who were so sure that Americans would be welcomed as 'liberators' in Iraq and succeed in making the country a model of democracy for the entire Middle East. The Dumb and the Dumbest sounds a more appropriate title for the current crew.
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