Iraq is not Vietnam!!!!!!

from Taegan Goddard's Political Wire: Flashback

"United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting." (New York Times, September 4, 1967)

And Billmon's Whiskey Bar (which is again open for business after a month of healing following the election), has this nugget to compare and contrast:

Signs of the Times

"Quagmire," "attrition," "credibility gap," "Iraqification" - a listener to the debate over the situation in Iraq might think that it truly is Vietnam all over again . . . But Iraq is not Vietnam, and 2003 is not 1975 or 1968.

New York Times November 9, 2003

The difficulties of achieving [U.S.] objectives, then and now, have led a range of military experts, historians and politicians to consider the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq . . . Nearly two years after the American invasion of Iraq, such comparisons are no longer dismissed in mainstream political discourse as facile and flawed, but are instead bubbling to the top.

New York Times January 29, 2005

And then there's always Dick Cheney's own words:

In a 1991 speech, then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney argued, "I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is also fallacious. I think if we were going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad, we would have to commit a lot of force… And once we'd done that and we'd gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we'd have had to put another government in its place… it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq."

And in case you're wondering, yes, the casualty count to this point in Operation Clusterfuck has exceeded that of the War in Vietnam.