Bush's "New Vietnam" Admission: A Missing Piece

President Bush's admission recently that Iraq is indeed the new Vietnam is a welcome step in the correct direction for the dialogue on the issue in the US. But just as LBJ and Nixon were wrong in their conclusions -- as history has documented -- so too is Mr. Bush incorrect. Unfortunately, as it turns out, so too are the majority of Americans on both sides of this debate. What people need to understand is:Iraq is not the new Vietnam: it is the new "Soviet" Afghanistan. And we are the new Russians.

It's a somewhat convoluted point, yes. But it is also something that desperately needs saying. By way of reference, according to the online Wall Street Journal, the "Bush Argument" goes something like this:

President George W. Bush boldly abandoned that template with his speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars on Wednesday. In a skillful bit of political jujitsu, he cited Vietnam not as evidence that the Iraq War is unwinnable, but to argue that the costs of giving up the fight would be catastrophic -- just as they were in Southeast Asia.

And, no -- this isn't really news. Comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam are plastered all over the news, and have been for quite some time.

Why do I make the comparison between Iraq and Soviet Afghanistan rather than Vietnam? It's rather simple; we're fighting the same enemy in Iraq that the Russians fought in Afghanistan: Al-Qaeda. A bit of reference on the Soviet war in Afghanistan:

The Soviet war in Afghanistan was a nine-year conflict involving Soviet forces supporting Afghanistan's Marxist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) government against the largely Islamic fundamentalist Mujahideen insurgents that were fighting to overthrow Soviet rule. The Soviet Union supported the government while the rebels found support from a variety of sources including the United States, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and other Muslim nations in the context of the Cold War. This conflict was concurrent to the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War.

[...]

Some observers believe the economic and military cost of the war contributed significantly to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991^[5].

This is, specifically, what we face. An enemy who wishes our destruction, plain and simple -- and is using the same tactics that they did on the Soviet "Empire". It worked once before -- why not again? Why else, do you think, there are so relatively few "IED"'s that are strong enough to kill immediately? There have been roughly 7.3 times as many non-fatal casualties as there have been fatalities. That takes fore-planning to achieve, even with modern medicine. By now it has been made clear that no attacks on US soil can bring us down; the relatively quick rebound from the massive damage done on the infamous "9/11" proves that. This is why Al-Qaeda's efforts not on "Arab soil" all take place in non-American soil: Greece, Africa, the (non-US) Philippines -- primarily places, ironically, where the Muslim presence is strong.

This needs saying, and nobody else is saying it: The longer we stay in Iraq the more we will be bled dry by "insurgents" who want nothing more than to kill us on their own soil -- and lack the infrastructure, support, and ability to inflict serious damage to us on our soil. If we wish to survive as a nation of wealth, prosperity, and freedom -- there is only one choice:

Bring our soldiers home.