Why Iraq isn't Vietnam!

The always excellent Christopher Hitchens has a great article on why those people who call Iraq "the next vietnam" have no idea what they are talking about. Here is a moneyshot : American generals and policymakers could never agree as to whether the guerrillas in Vietnam were self-supporting or were sustained from the outside (namely the northern half of their own country). However one may now view that debate, it was certainly true that Hanoi, and the southern rebels, were regularly resupplied not by minor regional potentates but by serious superpowers such as the Warsaw Pact and China, and were able to challenge American forces in battlefield order. The Iraqi "insurgents" are based among a minority of a minority, and are localized geographically, and have no steady source of external supply. Here the better comparison would be with the dogmatic Communists in Malaya in the 1940s, organized principally among the Chinese minority and eventually defeated even by an exhausted postwar British empire. But even the die-hard Malayan Stalinists had a concept of "people's war" and a brave record in fighting Japanese imperialism. The Iraqi "insurgents" are dismal riff-raff by comparison. Go read it! Ohh, and the next time some anti-war leftie tells you that this is the next vietnam tell them to go read a book, after delivering a swift kick to their asses of course ! It's for their own good. Trust me on this!