Yes, bone-headed war. I won't defend the war in Vietnam or even the war in Korea, but they made more sense than the conquest of Iraq. In those conflicts, we didn't start the wars. They were already happening, and we intervened. There was no option to choose peace, in Vietnam and Korea, as there was in Iraq. It was merely a question of whether we tried to dictate the course of the wars, or sat back and let them take their own course. Moreover, in Vietnam and Korea, there was a serious existential threat posed by global communism, headed up by the Soviet Union, which was a true superpower. A little paranoia by Americans about the threat of communist expansion made sense, given the power of what we were up against. By comparison, paranoia about the threat posed by Iraq, which had been successfully contained and isolated for a decade, and which was a fourth-rate power to begin with, simply wasn't justified. So don't try to pretend the Iraq war is precedented by those early conflicts. The decision to start a war against a sovereign nation against the will of the international community and many of our own key allies was an unprecedented move -- and a disastrously bone-headed one.