More smears from Taranto

James Taranto claims (without evidence, of course) that "some" in the left and the press want America to be defeated in Iraq:

That Iraq is "another Vietnam" was a cliche long before the U.S.-led coalition even liberated Baghdad, but lately the drumbeat has become louder and more tired than ever. A Google News search for "Iraq" and "Vietnam" turns up more than 6,500 articles in the past month...

Is Iraq really similar to Vietnam? Only in the sense that some in politics and the media would like to see America lose.

This is the latest in a long pattern of suggestions that critics of the war in Iraq hate America or want to undermine the US war effort. And, though I don't like facile Vietnam analogies, how can Taranto possibly think that there are no similarities between the two wars?

Comments

[Michael Koplow]

Future searches for articles that contain both "Iraq" and "Vietnam" will come up with Taranto's article. The stupidity of this procedure for showing the currency of the Iraq-Vietnam cliche is revealed just by giving the procedure.

[Under Construction]

I Googled "war" and "peace" and got 31,900,000 hits. Since they were mentioned in the same articles, the authors must have been equating them. All these authors are victims of Orwellian thought control and believe that war is peace. Makes sense to me.

[John K]

The similarity between Vietnam and Iraq is that people die.
But there are lessons here. When the United States has stayed on after fighting dictatorial enemies--admittedly for decades in Italy, Germany, Japan, Korea and the Balkans--progress toward democracy and prosperity ensued. Disengagement from unresolved messy problems--whether from Europe after World War I, Vietnam in 1973, Beirut after the Marine barracks bombings, Afghanistan after the Soviet defeat, or Iraq in 1991--only left murderous chaos or the "peace" of authoritarian dictators.