A failed analogy

Greg Richards:

A couple of days ago Senator Kerry clarified his position on the Iraq War. At the Democrats’ Take Back America strategy conference, in Washington, he said that his vote for the war was a mistake and that we should bring the troops home.

His analogy is Vietnam – in Kerry’s view we stayed too long in Vietnam and now “it is time for us to go” from Iraq. And there are superficial parallels between Vietnam and Iraq that many have remarked on – particularly that we are fighting an enemy who is hard for us to find, with much initiative on his side.

But there is a big difference between Vietnam and Iraq. Ultimately, in Vietnam, we could choose as much war as we wanted. We could, and ultimately did, retire without serious consequences. That is not true for Iraq.

Ho Chi Minh, whatever his faults, only wanted to get to Saigon. Osama bin Laden and the radical Islamist jihad wants to get to New York and Washington. That is the big difference.

We are fighting in Iraq, yes, for the Iraqis, but also for ourselves. This war is enlightened self-interest. We fight and prevail over the Islamist forces in Iraq, which will go a long way to discrediting them, or we fight them here. Yes, there is no assurance that we won’t also have to fight them here anyway, but our offensive strategy in the War of Terror has been far more successful than anybody would have bet on after 9/11 – no major attacks in the U.S. in five years.

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There is more. There are so many differences with Vietnam that it is hard to catologue all of them. About the only similarity is that the same people want to lose both wars.