Some fool reporter just asked if Iraq is Vietnam.
One more time for you baby boomers or those obessed with the Sixties....
Iraq is independent and whole, Vietnam was divided, with one half supported by China and the Soviets, the other by the Free World.
Iraq is a post-war occupation, Vietnam was a civil war.
Most importantly.....
US Deaths in Vietnam: over 52,000
US Deaths in Iraq: less than 3000
Next time someone tries to make this comparison, simply ask if they know how American soldiers died in Vietnam. In the twenty times I've asked this question, I have received a close answer once.
Folks (generally these are baby boomers or anti-war protestors) who make this comparisonare lacking in historical knowledge. While deaths in Iraq are tramatic to those who lose family memebrs , they are militariliy insignificant. America has lost more men in a single day many more times than have been lost in the totality of the Iraq war.
UPDATE:
More on this in response to a reader comment:
The Vietnam War was a proxy war fought between two (or three, if you include China) superpowers, executed on Vietnamese territory. The Viet Cong were not, as most of the Iraqi guerillas are, an indigenous force. They were North Vietnamese who infiltrated South Vietnam with the support of the U.S.'s enemies the USSR and China.
Although during the conflict the contention of the anti-war protestors in the United States was that the VC was a an indigenous force fighting an oppressive government, this argument was definitively settled by Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, who led all North Vietnamese forces, when he admitted sometime in the 1990’s, "The VC were never a South Vietnamese army, we were a unit of the North Vietnamese Army supported by our Communist brethren."
Of course, the VC denied this during the war in order to take advantage of the anti-war movement tin the United Sates. While I truly believe their motives may have been pure, they consistantly ignored the evidence that the VC was a wholesale creation of the North Vietnamese government. Because of this, they tended to be yet anonther in a long list of Westerners who served as Communism's “useful idiots.”
The Vietnam War was a war in all senses, involving the taking and holding of territory, engagements between divisions, regiments and companies, both of VC and regular North Vietnamese Army (NVA.)
The Iraq War ended the day Baghdad fell. Wars end upon the capture of the enemy’s capital or the surrender or decapitation of your enemy (Saddam); or inability of that leadership to continue to control his forces. What we have in Iraq is an occupation, which has been troubled by a stubborn insurgency made of remaining fighters of a defeated army, and some foreign fighters, supported by our new enemy in the region, Iran.
