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Reflections on comparing Iraq and Vietnam....

George Bush has drawn a long-bow, or most likely got it totally wrong, in attempting to draw on parallels between or lessons from the present Iraq war and the ill-fated Vietnam one.

How the people around him deal with the present situation in Iraq isn't without interest either - as veteran journalist Robert Parry explores in this piece on his blog consortiumnews.com:

"Now that President Bush has invited comparisons between Iraq and Vietnam, a parallel could be drawn between Gates and Clark Clifford, the Defense Secretary who took over the job in March 1968 at the height of the Vietnam War and persuaded President Lyndon Johnson to start down the road toward a negotiated settlement.

Like Gates, Clifford replaced a Defense Secretary (Robert McNamara) who was tied to an increasingly unpopular war. McNamara was considered as much an architect of the Vietnam War as Gates’s predecessor (Donald Rumsfeld) was of the Iraq War.

In another parallel, it was learned later that McNamara harbored grave doubts about the prospects for victory in Vietnam and that Rumsfeld privately urged Bush to consider a de-escalation in Iraq before stepping down last November.

But a key difference in the cases of Clifford and Gates is that Clifford initiated the excruciating process of withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam, while Gates so far has simply overseen an escalation of U.S. troops into Iraq, the “surge.” Instead of convincing Bush to look for a route out of Iraq, Gates helped send more troops in.

The question now confronting Gates is whether he will continue to be Bush’s loyal front man on the war or chart a course closer to the views of the Pentagon’s top brass who favor a sharp reduction in U.S. troop levels in Iraq next year."

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