Before You Start About Vietnam...

I grew up around many guys who went to Vietnam, a few in combat units, but most in some form of diligent administrative capacity which occupies the vast part of our military. All of them served honorably, and quite a number harbor quiet, lingering resentment because they feel the enormous weight of prior restraint on their free speech. They would love to point with pride that our country did actually blunt the advance of outright tryranny on a continent - and that to their regret they were unable to bring the light of freedom and democracy to that country. What they do know is that Vietnam was "superpower" conflict-by-proxy, and that it was an anvil upon which China and the Soviet Union hammered & sickled out their vision of world domination. The confusion for them is the manner in which our foreign policy - the art of geopolitical "containment" and micromanagement - was allowed to dominate the business of doing what our military does best: kick ass, take names, and go home. The precision insight below, from the "Great One" Jay Reding as compiled from InstaPundit, sums up the stark dichotomy, as it stands in the post 9/11 era of "Terror War With Islamic Fundamentalism" - and the risky business of making comparative analogies with the Vietnam experience:

Bush seems to be falling victim to his own success. We have been so successful in the war on terror that the country doesn't see it as a war anymore.

Consider the following: If you were told on 9/21/2001 that by this date:

The Taliban have fallen

Iraq has fallen and has become a bastion of free press in the islamic world.

Libya had given up its WMD's

North Korea is in multi-lateral talks about WMD's

A majority of the leadership of Al Queda are dead or in custody

Pro-democracy rumblings are going on in Iran

Arafat is isolated

Many convictions of domestic sleepers or Al Queda members (Portland, NY etc...) and finally

NO SUCCESSFUL TERROR ATTACKS ON US SOIL

And all of this has cost less than 1000 dead American soldiers.

You'd be thinking "not bad."

Bush said in his Sept. 20th speech that even if the country forgets he will not. He was right.

Indeed, in no period in history has so much been achieved with such little bloodshed... although one would never think so based on the horribly biased reporting of most of the worldwide media.

The next deals with the old "Iraq = Vietnam" canard:

The anti-war types keep comparing Iraq to Vietnam. This has made me think...

If less than a year after US troops first landed in Vietnam, they had occupied all of North Vietnam, had Ho Chi Minh and General Giap dead or in custody, had an interim government in place, and were preparing for free elections (which of course in actuality Vietnam still doesn't have forty years later), all for under five hundred combat casulaties, that wouldn't have been such a bad outcome.

Of course people will say the situations aren't comparable. That's right -- they aren't comparable, so people should stop trying to make bogus analogies between the two situations.