Iraq Is Not Another Vietnam

CBS - National Review Online ^ | June 23, 2006 | Ben Wattenberg.

[bitt]

Senator John Kerry has been comparing the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, and indicating that they are very similar; his conclusion is its time to get out. Not for the first time, Kerry is dead wrong. There are indeed similarities, but — not withstanding what we read and see in the media — there are important differences as well. Let me offer a blunt appraisal. It is not regarded as polite to mention it — almost no one does — but most of the grunts in Vietnam were draftees; in Iraq, they all volunteered.

On the Vietnam Memorial in Washington are about 58,000 names; in Iraq, the total number of KIAs is lower than the number of Americans killed on 9/11.

Those are pretty big differences. As for the similarities, they do, as I said, exist — but they don’t bolster Kerry’s case for withdrawal. The central similarity is that both wars were defensive efforts against a global foe. We were right to fear the expansion of totalitarian Communism. We lost that battle — actually the South Vietnamese Army lost it two and a half years after we disengaged — but we won the war. Wars, after all, are won by the party that triumphs in the final showdown: The Soviet Union has disappeared, and its satellites deorbited. In Iraq, our foe is jihadism, which likewise seeks global domination. To think that they can’t achieve this against a technologically superior West is simply a failure of imagination: One terrorist with a smallpox virus might be able to wipe out half a population.

[RightWhale]

Kerry is a fountain of material.

[Cinnamon]

Kerry should stick marrying rich widows...

[Cinnamon]

Kerry should stick to marrying rich widows...

[Screamname]

Actually Iraq is like Vietnam being that we once again have Kerry backstabbing our vets and the US. What was it that this slimebag said last year, something about US vets terrorizing Iraqi women and children?

[boomop1]

DITTO that...

[Tribune7]

It sure isn't. The CBS anchorman was caught in his lie and the NYT is being seen a a traitorous organization, not a heroic one.

[bitt]

seeing this old picture, taken just after? the first debate, reminded me of just how lucky we were to avoid seeing THIS guy Kerry and his "wife" in the White House...

[se_ohio_young_conservative]

one simularity is that liberals are getting our troops killed by giving the enemy as a reason to get up and keep fighting.

as Rush has said.. the same crew that undermined the US during Viet Nam is the same croud that are trying to do the same thing in Iraq. look around, same faces. John Kerry, Teddy Kennedy. on and on.

the good news is. they are failing now, and these people are old and way past their heyday. they will eventually croak.

[bitt]

"I'm sorry, Teresa, the line for the porta potty is long and no one would let you cut in, even when I TOLD them who I was....do you have a twenty on you?"

[stockstrader]

The only similiarity is the willingness of liberals and the MSM to do their best to give 'aid-and-comfort' to the enemies of the US, to give encouragement to those enemies, and to do their best to undermine the efforts of our military.

Never mind--I guess there are several similiarities after all.

[Marius3188]

Iraq and the Vet. War are different.

But, the author's article implies they are more similar than not. Weird. I thought he was trying to prove otherwise.

[sgtbono2002]

One thing is the same Kerry is still a back stabbing cowardly weasel.

[Rurudyne]

Well, there is one similarity:

In Vietnam––as in Korea––we were facing the expansion of a world view opposed to everything America is based on. Likewise, in Iraq and Afghanistan we are facing the expression of a world view opposed to everything America is based on.

The differences may be crudely put that in those earlier conflicts our enemy most hated the way we made or living while this current enemy simply hates the way we live our lives.

In those earlier conflicts the same sort of people as Senator Kerry managed to prevent even the possibility of victory and then to later snatch utter defeat from the jaws of painful victory.

Now they mobilize again in opposition to a war that they helped start through 8 years of foreign policy and intelligence asset mismanagement on the tail end of more years of poor decisions with respect to this culture and its threat.

In doing so they completely IGNORE the fact that Iraq is, for the most part, the place where the people who would most like to kill Americans are going to die.

I say we should accommodate them.

If a military's function is to stand between the civilian population and those who would wish them harm, then Iraq and Afghanistan are precisely where they need to be. If we cut and run before we've filled the deserts with terrorist graveyards then we allow some of these idiots the time to realize that they could do us real damage by choosing to die HERE where American civilians and our economy are the target of the day.

Instead they are choosing to die in a theater of operations where they can only cause us a little harm as a nation. In addition, their "war of terror" is so stupidly conceived that they are actually loosing whatever abilities they had to wage it prior to 9/11. By comparison, we are learning how to fight them and their kind in a theater of operations where only our troops and our pride are at risk.

As we are learning they are forgetting.

Therefore it is our every interest to fight them where they stupidly want to fight us: again, if they want to die then we should happily accommodate them.

And this is where the DNC, Senator Kerry and political hacks like Albright simply are missing the boat: in all those earlier conflicts the peace-nicks at least were somewhat correct to assume that we could retreat from aggression for a time; BUT, what in a world that has seen the fall of the towers makes them think we have any place to safely retreat to THIS time?

The day we leave Iraq is the day they start packing to come over here––right through our porous borders.

[HIDEK6]

In college, I took a course called Military History. At the time, I thought it was worthless. Funny how your perceptions change.

I remember that the first thing I learned was the elements of national power: Natural resources, population, geographical location.

The point my professors made was that the US had an advantage in only two of the three, and we needed to learn how to overcome our deficit in the third, vis-a-vis (at the time) Red China.

Red China has not yet overtly tested us, but the Muslims are now testing us, and they have the same elements-of-power profile that Red China had then.

We must negate their population advantage before we can win.

[ALOHA RONNIE]

.

Long ago...

...Anti-Freedom JOHN KERRY gave a once Free South Vietnam:

Pictures of a vietnamese Re-Education Camp

http://www.Freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1308949/posts


JOHN KERRY is now trying to the same to a Free Iraq & Afghanistan.


The Enemy is now Within...
...and always has been.

.

[CyberAnt]

Yeah, we were breaking down doors and scaring women and children in the middle of the night.

So .. if those women choose to be there with their terrorist husbands .. that's not our fault.

[Screamname]

Like Ann Coulter says, one of the reasons Vietnam was lost was because liberals practically ran the entire US media. Back then there was no internet or Fox news to tell the truth, so the traitors were allowed to run amok, make the US and Nixon look like the enemies of all mankind and the Commies as innocent victims (funny when Vietnam is mentioned, liberals always refer to Nixon and not Johnson). It drives liberals nuts today that their drivel is not the all-ruling authority. If there was no Fox news, no WABC with Rush and Hannity, no internet, everybody would think (most everybody) that Iraq was competely lost, that Zarqawi was still alive, and Saddams sons were running the country.

[Allegra]

Actually Iraq is like Vietnam being that we once again have Kerry backstabbing our vets and the US.

And the other thing they have in common is that the press is/was on the bad guys' side in both wars.

[R.W.Ratikal]

No Iraq is not another Vietnam. In the war with communist Vietnam we were in combat with a country with the unlimited backing of communist Russia who supplied the materials of war. communist China also stood by to help fight America.

Ironically, at the same time Russia was supporting Vietnam, the U. S. was supplying Russia with everything it needed to help communist Vietnam.

Today, while Americans are dying in Iraq fighting terrorists, the U. S. is giving billions of dollars to terrorists groups such as the PLO and previously to Arafat's terrorist group, Fatah.

Go figure.