Down the Rabbit Hole

Fixer made this comment in his post below:

So, they're starting to frag their officers. Tell me again how Iraq isn't anything like Vietnam. If you think it's not, you are either delusional, ignorant of recent history (40 years ago), or a bloodyfool.

Tom Dispatch expands a little bit on it:

Welcome to Iraq...but call it Vietnam

If we haven't all gone down the rabbit hole in Baghdad and come out in the Saigon of another era, you can't prove it by recent news from catastrophic Iraq. Eerie doesn't do it justice.

Think "light at the end of the tunnel." Think the era of Lyndon Johnson. Think of that flood of positive numbers -- the "metrics" of victory -- that came pouring out of Vietnam and now, in the form of numbers of troops armed and trained for the new Iraqi Army, police, and security forces, is flooding out of Iraq. Top generals back in Washington all lend a helpful hand.

Compare that, for instance, to the following comment on the enemy: "The ability of the [insurgents] to rebuild their units and to make good their losses is one of the mysteries of this guerrilla war... Not only do [their] units have the recuperative powers of the phoenix, but they have an amazing ability to maintain morale." Oh sorry, that wasn't Iraq at all. That was actually Gen. Maxwell Taylor, American ambassador to South Vietnam, in November 1964.

Let's face it. This is deja vu all over again. In Vietnam, their Vietnamese regularly proved so much more admirable -- in the eyes of American military officers -- than ours. America's Vietnamese often seemed like the sorts of thugs white adventurers in Hollywood films had once defeated single-handedly. They were corrupt, cowardly, greedy, and rapacious in relation to their own people, and regularly amazingly unwilling to fight their own war.

All that was just in the prologue to Jonathon Schell's article "The Exception Is the Rule". Go read.