The Vietnam Analogy

Good guy columnist and economist Paul Krugman on the analogy that pisses off the hawks:

Iraq isn't Vietnam. The most important difference is the death toll, which is only a small fraction of the carnage in Indochina. But there are also real parallels, and in some ways Iraq looks worse.

It's true that the current American force in Iraq is much smaller than the Army we sent to Vietnam. But the U.S. military as a whole, and the Army in particular, is also much smaller than it was in 1968. Measured by the share of our military strength it ties down, Iraq is a Vietnam-size conflict.

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I've made the Vietnam comparison numerous times, myself. Of course, I realize that there are many differences between the two wars: the politics, geography, motivations, and history are all very different in many ways. The similarities, however, are so numerous that ignoring them would be a disservice to any discussion of the Iraq war. Bush doesn't hate the comparison because it undermines the war effort. He hates it because it hits too damned close to home.

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