Reverse Vietnam

Instapundit has a good post on Iraq and Vietnam. With the situation in Iraq, I have taken a longer and harder look at Vietnam, including reading Jim Dunnigan's Dirty Secrets of the Vietnam War and Max Boot's Savage Wars of Peace. My own thinking is reflected by the Tom Plank e-mail to Reynolds, "I am deeply skeptical of the claim that the military misled the press or the American people about the Vietnam War. [...] I thought the reporting on the war was nevertheless much more negative than what was actually going on."

One of the things that certainly different about Vietnam is that the military learned a lot of hard lessons about how to fight a large scale insurgency. This time around there is more nation-building, no attrition strategy, and no Johnson/Westmoreland happy talk. Apparently there is enough happy talk out there to give Jane Hall the notion that it should all be a ribbon cutting, but anyone who pays any attention at all hears analogy to the long twilight struggle of the Cold War, a long hard slog, and the like.

"The battle in Iraq and the battle in Afghanistan; it will be a slog, a long, hard slog. ...We're finding these terrorists where they are, and we're rooting them out, and we're capturing them, we're killing them. It's difficult work. It won't be over any time soon. And I will close by saying it will be a long hard slog, indeed."