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The writer makes a good point concerning the "vietnamization" of Iraq, and it brings to mind something that has been nagging at me for a while.

Having seen what we have done, taking down the Taliban in a few days with a few men, when the whole world was telling us it would be our graveyard, and then cutting through the Iraqi Army like knife through butter, for the second time in a decade, certain things become obvious to me.

We turned victory in Somalia into defeat. The country went from chaos to relative peace overnight, because we occupied it with some 30,000 marines. Then we pulled them out and replaced them with UN peacekeepers and a handful of rangers, and we did it prematurely, when no Somali institutions yet existed. A dramatic win was thrown away and the debacle that resulted is well known. But it was not an act of nature, unavoidable, just one of those things. The Somali disaster did not have to be. It happened because our leadership was not serious about finishing the job they inherited and they were too quick to hand it off to the UN.

The Viet Nam war similarly did not have to be the disaster it was. It was an incompetent monkey show because it was politicized from the beginning, and no one in Washington ever really believed it could be won. But I believe it very plainly could have been won, had we set about to win it.

And in fact, we abandoned it at the moment of victory. We had essentially won, and we walked away, and rendered the sacrifice of all of those lives for nothing. We walked away because we lost sight of what we were trying to do. We were never beaten on the battlefield, we were never in any danger of being beaten. We just lost heart and walked away.

This is what the same cast of characters is trying to do to us now. If we listen to them, we take the most impressive victory the world has ever seen and we throw it away. We cease in that moment to be a serious nation. If we cannot stay this course, and finish the job which we have well begun, then God help us, we are incapable of helping ourselves.

"We were never beaten on the battlefield, we were never in any danger of being beaten. We just lost heart and walked away."

You are correct..but before we lost heart and walked away, we were manipulated into thinking this way, just as we are now being manipulated to think the same. It was Horowitz who interviewed a N. Vietamese General who admitted they could never win on the battlefield and they relied on the dissenters to do the job for them. This is exactly what is happeneing today, as our enemies rely on our own useful idiots...including the liberal media, to wage this war for them.

It is our own citizens, including the media, who have enabled the enemies of this country to declare victories that they never would've been capable of winning without their help. This is not dissent...nor has it ever been. This is deliberate movement that is financed by hostile, outside sources, destined to destroy the will and character of this country. Weasley Clark may be content in calling this the "new" American Patriotism, but the truth is, this is nothing more than old-fashioned Marxism, designed to create discontent and division. They truly are the enemies within.

You are spot on. If the Dims get their way, we'll cut and run from Iraq, leaving it to the U.N., which means the Saddamites will seize control back. And they'll blame it all on the pubbies who, they'll claim, never should have gotten us into that "quagmire" in the first place.

Would the terrorists appreciate us leaving the Middle East? Oh, would they ever express their "appreciation."