On second thought...

Iraq is a quagmire, just like Vietnam.  So said Paul Abrams on the Huffington Post last February.

The Bush Administration insists that the Iraq War bears little resemblance to the Vietnam War. As with most of Bush Administration assertions, this claim bears little resemblance to the truth. Indeed, the similarities between Bush's Iraq War and Vietnam are many and granular. Incredibly, as if they denied all the lessons of the first tragedy, the generation that was itself stuck in the quagmire of Vietnam has mired its own children in the quicksand of Iraq.

But that was eons ago.  February.  The troop buildup in Iraq had hardly begun, and though the bipartisan report on Iraq suggested a temporary rise in troop levels might quell sectarian violence, opponents of Iraq liberation resisted.  The crux of their argument -- Iraq is Vietnam redux.  We're involved in an unjust war that we can't win.  It's an argument that gained steam in the months before all of the additional troops arrived in Iraq. 

But then something happened.  The counterinsurgency conceived by General Petraeus began to have its impact.  Tribal leaders in Anbar began to turn on al Qaeda and join the Americans in fighting the terrorists.  Sectarian violence has been reduced.  Although government at the national level seems not to have accomplished much, at the grass roots level a reconciliation seems to be afoot.  All of this would argue that we continue the strategy.  It's having success.

It is in that context that President Bush spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City, warning against a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq by invoking the memory of Vietnam.

Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. There's no debate in my mind that the veterans from Vietnam deserve the high praise of the United States of America. (Applause.) Whatever your position is on that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like "boat people," "re-education camps," and "killing fields."

There was another price to our withdrawal from Vietnam, and we can hear it in the words of the enemy we face in today's struggle -- those who came to our soil and killed thousands of citizens on September the 11th, 2001. In an interview with a Pakistani newspaper after the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden declared that "the American people had risen against their government's war in Vietnam. And they must do the same today."

His number two man, Zawahiri, has also invoked Vietnam. In a letter to al Qaeda's chief of operations in Iraq, Zawahiri pointed to "the aftermath of the collapse of the American power in Vietnam and how they ran and left their agents."

Zawahiri later returned to this theme, declaring that the Americans "know better than others that there is no hope in victory. The Vietnam specter is closing every outlet." Here at home, some can argue our withdrawal from Vietnam carried no price to American credibility -- but the terrorists see it differently.

Press response has been swift.  In today's Washington Post Jim Hoagland protests.

Desperate presidents resort to desperate rhetoric -- which then calls new attention to their desperation. President Bush joined the club this week by citing the U.S. failure in Vietnam to justify staying on in Iraq.

Bush's comparison of the two conflicts rivals Richard Nixon's "I am not a crook" utterance during Watergate and Bill Clinton's "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky," in producing unintended consequences of a most damaging kind for a sitting president...

...Vietnam and Iraq are totally different situations.

Editor & Publisher convened its group of experts (journalists) who agree with Hoagland.  All those polled dispute the President's analogy.  Whatever happened to balance?

Robert Dallek, author of several celebrated biographies of recent U.S. presidents, including Lyndon Johnson, told the Los Angeles Times: “"It just boggles my mind, the distortions I feel are perpetrated here by the president..."

Iraq is Vietnam?  Or is Iraq not Vietnam?  Iraq is what the press want it to be depending on how it best supports their demands for American surrender.  Today, according to the press, Iraq is not Vietnam.  But isn't it entertaining to observe press indignation now that their pet argument has been used against them?