artbrooks, we followed the French into Vietnam. While we had a few Aussies and Kiwis with us in Vietnam, and a few forces from the current coalition of Anglo countries in Iraq, neither of them is comparable to the broad based coalition of the Gulf War, where we had allies in the region (despicable as the Saudis are).

I don't think you can call the invasion and occupation a military success, considering that there aren't any countries on the planet that could prevent our overthrow of their government by our staging a military invasion of their country, so that seems like a pretty insignificant point to me.

The point I'm making here isn't that we can't make a single reasonable comparison between our involvement in Vietnam and the current situation with Iraq and the Middle East. Of course we can.

The point I'm making is that doing so makes it easy to engage in splatterball presidential politics, but impossible to get a grip on what is actually going on, and how we can turn things around for the sake of the people in the region.

Remember, the US military doesn't count the numbers of civilians killed, injured, and displaced by our military operations. It truly is not our peoople who are suffering in this. It is the Iraqis. We owe it to them not to get sucked into the mindset the whole Iraq/Vietnam drags us down to, which is the highly partisan presidential quagmire.