MB Civic

By Richard Cohen | Tuesday, November 21, 2006 | The Washington Post

Political analyst Richard Cohen does a brilliant job of laying out the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, including some I have never seen before. Without stealing this writer’s thunder, the most important (and HAIR-relevant) of these is this one:

“…As with Vietnam, we are fighting now merely not to lose — to avoid a full-fledged civil war (it’s coming anyway) or to keep the country together, something like that. But not for victory. Not for democracy. All this talk of the Iraqis doing more on their own behalf is Vietnamization in the desert rather than the jungle. What remains the same is asking soldiers to die for a reason that the politicians in Washington can no longer explain. This, above all, is how Iraq is like Vietnam: older men asking younger men to die while they try to figure something out.” In short, WOW…BS

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/20/AR2006112000965.html