Iraq = Vietnam

Another disjointed comparison of Iraq and Vietnam from the liberal university elite:

American defeats are hauntingly similar. Informed by cultural and political ignorance, we invade and occupy while denying intelligence that warns against folly. Hubris tells us our power is unassailable. Politicians market paranoia to silence reasoned deliberation, and those who profit from war or reconstruction buy into the conflict as long as it adds to the bottom line.

American defeats are self-inflicted. We fight the wrong wars against illusory foes, thinking the enemy is one when it is another. We sense ubiquitous peril from all who differ from "us."

The deliberation of action in Iraq went on for months, months that the so called Iraqi insurgency used to stash weapons throughout the country. Months that allowed radical Islamists to flood the country (those that weren't already there) and prepare for the reconstruction phase they knew would come. These heathens don't want reconstruction, they want Shiites dead.

Our defeats are self inflicted because of people such as the author of this piece who preach the same tired rhetoric about wars for money and "illusory foes". We didn't choose this war, it was thrust on us by a nationless enemy who wants the world to not be secular but part of the next caliphate. Mr. Nelson, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, is seeing the world through 30-year old Vietnam-colored bifocals.

We had a momentarily decisive battlefield victory in Iraq. But triumph was illusory and ephemeral. Too soon, 2,000 Americans will have died, 12,000 seriously wounded, and additional thousands with psychological or other illness will have required evacuation. Iraqi deaths are now 50 to 100 per day. The number of coalition members and their troops are ebbing. The frequency and severity of insurgent attacks against U.S., Iraqi or allied assets continue to rise - encouraged, not abated, by an election and formation of a government. Even the Bush administration's National Intelligence Council reported in early 2005 that global terrorism has been strengthened, recruiting new generations of jihadists to kill and die for charismatic leaders.

The simple fact is that these young men and women were not drafted, they are all volunteers who knew the risks associated with the military life. I knew it when I joined.

Is Mr. Nelson so naive as to think that less than four years into the War on Terror that it would be all tidy and neat? Of course jihadists are murdering civilians. This is the same MO they've employed for years under the guise of rebellion or revolution. Or as the liberal left refers to them; Freedom Fighters. The jihadi's didn't need us to mobilize them, Osama bin-Laden already had them agitated to the point that 19 of them hijacked four planes and murdered 3,000 American citizens. I'd bet one or two of them attended the University of New Haven.

When Americans withdrew from Vietnam, they did not do so because democracy had been preserved or a timetable was set, but because of the unmitigated defeat of the puppet regime they had created and maintained. Washington decision-makers should contemplate such a scenario in Iraq, before we need helicopter evacuation of Americans from rooftops of the Green Zone.

Is Mr. Nelson implying that the democratically elected government in Iraq is a "puppet regime"? Dean Nelson can't separate the Vietnam war with the current situation it seems. Liberals want so badly to see this war end up as Vietnam did that they have inextricably linked the two in their own minds. In other words, leftist gospel is now that Vietnam = Iraq. They cling to this gospel as the evil Evangelical Christians hold to their beliefs. The problem is that the Vietnam = Iraq gospel is far more damaging to our country than any Christian held belief.

America's weakening global position should spur thoughts of withdrawal. The United States today has fewer friends than at any time since the end of World War II, and its strengths are hemorrhaging. The "insecuring" of America involves the rapid and simultaneous ebbing of national capacities: Cultural tolerance is trampled by religious zealotry, political freedom constrained by irrational fear, and financial institutions weakened under massive deficits.

There it is! What took Mr. Nelson so long to inject "religious zealotry' into the debate. In the leftist playbook, that should be included in the first paragraph. I guess he didn't get the e-mail.

What political freedom has been constrained, Mr. Nelson? The financial institutions you caution us about are sounder now than in years. As a matter of fact, the steady crumbling of the EU has only strengthened the dollar as the preeminent currency around the globe.

Those who fall in Iraq soon will have their own monument in Washington. But on future Memorial Days, little solace will come to a nation made far weaker and less secure in these eight years. Survivors will question, as they did in the last generation, the purpose of sacrifice.

"These last eight years"? Is Dean Nelson inferring that this war began under Bill Clinton. I believe it started far longer than eight years ago, but our belated response made the job much more difficult. If this war had started in 1997 or earlier, we may not even be having this national conversation. We'd been under attack in Africa, Yemen and NYC and failed to respond, perhaps if we had shown any leadership then, the situation would be much improved today.

By the way, note that the Inquirer dug up this piece that originally appeared in the far-left site Common Dreams and chose to run it on Memorial Day, a day that us veterans hold sacred.