"Iraq is not Vietnam. IT IS MUCH WORSE."

[Bluebear]

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.

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6028

[ThomWV]

1. Worse For The Country - Not For The Soldier

We were losing 200 men a week in Viet Nam in the late 1960's.

[babylonsister]

2. Unless you're a soldier who comes home limbless or with their brains

scrambled. I know about the numbers, and how excellent the medical attention is in Iraq, which is keeping the numbers of dead down. But those who are 'saved' might regret it.

[sarge43]

4. Plus, with some exceptions, the Nam soldiers didn't endure

back-to-back tours. "Not dead, seriously wounded or raving? Let's try that again."

[ThomWV]

5. Look at the homeless RVN Vets on every street corner

I disagree.

It is better to die than to lose a limb? I doubt very much that many of those who were 'saved' regret it.

Yes, medical treatment has improved but that's not why so many fewer GIs are dieing in Iraq. The first reason that fewer are dieing in Iraq is that there are only about half as many people there as there were in Viet Nam. The second reason, and this is one that jumps out at Viet Nam vets but really goes either unnoticed or unmentioned today; in Viet Nam going on patrol did not mean getting into a Hum-V and taking a couple of hour ride, it ment boots on the ground, lots of them, and for days on end.

Back to the point - 200 men per week died in Viet Nam, generally less than 100 a month die in Iraq. There are 50,000 names on the Viet Nam wall, less than a tenth of that number has died in Iraq although the war against Iraq has gone on longer.

[WinkyDink]

3. One other comparison: Many more will die, and we will leave ignominiously.

[Rydz777]

6. Well said, but its is not true that there is "only one comparison that

can be made between Vietnam and Iraq...." Yes, the "hollowness of the White House" is one, but there is another important comparison. Both were UNDECLARED WARS. The Constitution gives Congress, not the President, the power to declare war. Tomkin Gulf and Iraq Resolutions are not the equivalent of a Constitutional declaration of war. They are in fact subterfuges and usurpations.

The lesson for the future - to avoid further such disasters - is this: No wars without a formal Declaration by the Congress. We have not had such a Declaration since World War II, and this is our Constitutional protection against folly, misadventure, and the misbegotten temptation to be the world's policeman.

[NI4NI]

7. Another thing, during Viet Nam there were no war drums

beating for the bombing of red China or the USSR who supplied North Viet Nam wth ALL the weapons used to kill Americans with much unlike today's call for attacking Iran.

[RaleighNCDUer]

8. Well, there were a few -

Curtis LeMay wanted to nuke Hanoi, and he had to have known that would start a nuclear conflagration.