You know the homily; Those refusing to learn from history repeat history. Well, there you have it still relatively fresh in the history books, the lessons of the United States’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

What well educated morons fail to grasp is that those lessons are NOT INVALIDATED if they are not replete with one-to-one correlations with the current war entanglement. It’s the situation in general that matters.

A generally uneducated population with unsecured borders, not wedded to the ideas being pushed by Americans. Terrain that very nearly sneers at American ingenuity. Idiot and corrupt and self-serving politicians as our allies. Relatively loyal and disciplined guerilla forces on the opposite side able to retreat and huddle up where we can’t reach them.

Those are the general shared traits that match the history books Christopher Hitchens and it does not matter that some specifics are different.

The same thing applies in Iraq. We all know what’s going to happen to that nation after the United States finishes withdrawing. It will remain neither stable nor friendly to us in the long term. The surge is the same as if we had created a semi-stable South Vietnamese government and then pulled out without eliminating or adequately stalemating their enemies – precisely the same as Iraq, as a matter of fact, with their corrupt and unstable government and Iran grinning in anticipation while it continues to work to destabilize the situation in Iraq.

Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam; the collective similarities are startling and haunting and it’s going to turn out that what those nations share as traits is one hell of a lot more important than what they do not.

I don’t know what you read instead of history, Christopher Hitchens, but you are doing neither yourself nor your readers any favors. ANYONE that paid attention to what happened in Vietnam, and why and how the southern portion ultimately collapsed, sees a great deal that is terribly familiar about what is currently happening inside BOTH Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pull your head out of your Afghanistan Hitchens and learn HOW to think.

Good post. It's Hitchen's the huckster's method. It's why he supported all these recent wars of aggression. These aren't like the patent remedy that made you sick before. This is the new IMPROVED patent medicine that is still going to make you sick. This is Lucy promising again that she won't pull the football out from Charlie Brown. Everything is different when everything is the same.

"I have written dozens of times about how none of the so-called parallels with Vietnam are any good (al-Qaida a foreign import to Afghanistan" ...

just those Ruskies and the foreign commie ideology that was responsible for the Vietnamese resisting us.

"; no Vietcong threat to American cities; you know the rest)..."

just the dominoes poised to fall, the spread of communism throughout the world and the end to our way of life

", but there is one thing that did disfigure South Vietnam and is essential to avoid in any case: the commitment of American forces to a government that contrives to be both enriched and bankrupt at the same time and makes its own people want to spit."

Hey that's unavoidable when you have no popular support. They want to spit on us too for all the suffering we have brought.