Now He Brings Up Vietnam

For 4 years many on the left raised concerns that the brain dead leadership on the right were leading us into another Vietnam, an untenable quagmire that that will eat up men and machines without any significant overall change.

These statements were dismissed as not relevant and alarmist.

Now it appears that George Bush agrees. He is now admitting that, in his foolishness, he has led this nation into another Vietnam. But, staying true to the idiocy that made him believe that invading Iraq was a good idea, he is trying to sell that wrong idea about why we lost Vietnam.

He claims the lesson from that war is that we didn't stay long enough. He promotes the rather foolish notion that with more men, more weapons, more freedom of activity, we could have won.

He is wrong.

Iraq and Vietnam have this one simple fact in common, the overwhelming majority of the population do not want us in their nation. When this is the case, there is no amount of force, no real change of strategy, short of genocide, that can prevent the eventual defeat of the occupying force.

It is about hearts and minds, and if you can not win them, you have lost. In Vietnam we could not win them, and it is very clear that we have failed at this in Iraq. This is the lesson that we should have learned from Vietnam, and the one we need to remember when we consider out next steps in Iraq.

Yet, this deserter from service during the Vietnam war, is telling us that the failure in Vietnam was a lack of commitment ( a commitment that his desertion from the armed forces indicates the he also lacked ).

Iraq is lost. It was lost the day we decided to invade. The only, very slim, chance to win with the course we are on would be to insert 400,000 or more troops to end the game of Wack-a-mole that we are currently engaged in. Since there is no place to get 400,000 more troops, we have to admit it is over.