This country apparently never learned the lessons of Vietnam, and it was to our detriment in Iraq.
When they write the history books about the U.S. in the first decade of the 21st Century, George W. Bush will be remembered as the second incarnation of Lyndon Johnson.
We haven’t had a chance since the end of WWII when we quit defeating our enemies and decided to fight to force them to negotiate.
I’m not going to blame Bush for the current Iraqi mess but I do blame him as well as myself for being wrong.
The current circumstances are exactly the opposite of what happened in Vietnam. In Vietnam, a US President became obsessed with the prospect of losing his supermajorities in Congress because of "losing" Vietnam. He believed that would happen because, as FDR's fixer in the Senate, he [falsely] concluded that the Republicans retook that chamber when China fell to the communists. Consequently, he did nothing more than what was necessary not to lose.
Nixon did what was necessary to win, and when American Leftists finally extracted their revenge against Nixon for embarrassing them during the Hiss-Chambers case, Democrats in Congress and a weak, stupid, Republican successor refused to enforce the US terms of the Vietnam peace treaty, a treaty which, like their treaty with the French, the communists had negotiated in bad faith and never had any intention of honoring.
What is happening in Iraq is exactly the opposite. Bush did what was necessary to win despite enormous opposition and the loss of the Congress, left the country with a promising start, and his Democrat successor has p!ssed it away.