We could have won Vietnam? Really?!

As the Iraq Study Group and most of the country seek to extricate ourselves from the morass that is Iraq, the comparisons to Vietnam have found their way into the political discourse. One might expect such comparisons given the poor planning and strategy, the deaths of young American soldiers, and the open ended commitment of troops. Ironically, though the comparisons are coming from the twenty percent of Americans who still support this war.

In recent weeks, moral standard-bearers for the hard core conservatives such as Tom Delay have started to work allusions of Vietnam into their public statements. Neo-cons who are still holding out so in Iraq so that their ideology might not totally be debunked, are looking for someone to blame other than themselves, their ideology, or the failings of their guys in the White House. Getting out ahead of the inevitable framing of Iraq as another Vietnam, the conservatives have gone on the offensive by defining the issue as a loss of the American will. In the very worst kind of revisionist history, the loss of the Vietnam is being attributed to a loss of American will, rather than the untenable overextension of our forces into ideological civil war.

In comparisons to Vietnam, these conservatives (many of whom did what they could to avoid fighting in Vietnam themselves) blame our failure in Iraq on the American people. Apparently, our diminishing will to win is the root cause of our failure in Iraq. Forget the fact that every book written by accomplished reporters have told tails of criminal incompetence, gross negligence, and complete failure of strategy. Forget the charges of failed planning of former members of the military from former Generals to GIs. Forget the administration’s years of pigheaded staying the course no matter how much conditions on the ground worsened. The

I have a message to the Tom Delay, Bill Kristol, Dick Cheney and indeed the President:

THIS WAR’S FAILURE IS NOT OUR FAULT!

You are the guys who gave us the rosy scenarios of “We’ll be welcomed as liberators� and “Mission Accomplished� and “The insurgency is in its last throes�.
You are the guys who gave out no-bid contracts with not a lick worth of oversight.
You are the guys who didn’t plan on enough troops.
You are the guys who lied about the reasons for war.
You are the guys beating the drums of war, rather seeking alternatives for peace.
You are the one that brought us the un-Christian strategy of pre-emptive strikes, the first in our nation’s history.

You got us into this war, now the American people are demanding that you get us out. Doing so will require that the President will have to say I made a terrible, terrible mistake. And for the second time in his life, he can be man enough to own up to his mistake and change his course.

Just like our over-extension in Vietnam, victory in the glowing terms that the President has spoken about is just not possible. American troops are yet again placed in the midst of a Civil War in which domestic passions can not be quelled by an outside force. It took us 7 years to get our Vietnam at the cost of thousands of American and Vietnamese lives. Let history not repeat itself: let us not take 7 years, but 7 months to rid ourselves of this conflict.