13 Reasons

It seems like we have been picking on the Left a lot here as of late.  So as a token of good faith, I think we should engage in some healthy Bush bashing.  Christopher Hitchens makes it pretty easy this week, giving us 13 reasons why President Bush’s comparison of Iraq to Vietnam was really, really stupid. 

I won’t provide the entire list, but here are a couple of my favorites:

5) The Vietnamese leadership appealed to the UN: the Saddamists and their jihadist allies murdered the first UN envoy to arrive in Iraq, saying that he was fit only for death because he had assisted in securing the independence of East Timor from Indonesia. 

…

12) President Eisenhower admitted that if there had ever been a fair election in Vietnam, it would have been won by Ho Chi Minh; the Baath party’s successors refused to participate in the Iraqi elections and their jihadist allies declared that democracy was an alien concept and threatened all voters with murder.

Both solid points.  However, while Hitchens directs most of his ire towards the post-Saddam Baathists, he pays very little attention to the Shi’a militias roaming the countryside for blood and revenge.  Can the Madhi Army in the south of Iraq be compared to the Vietminh in northern Vietnam?  Perhaps it could be said that were there ever a fair election in Iraq, it would be won by Muqtada Al-Sadr.

That notwithstanding, his overall point is well taken.  The problem with the comparison to Vietnam is that you were still dealing with statists there who believed in secular and “democratic” methods of governance.  Despite the inherently obvious flaws in Communism, it was still an earthly doctrine built to create an ideal society now. 

The same cannot be said of the enemy we face in Iraq.  Their nihilistic tendencies, their propensity to link their cause to a religious movement as opposed to a national identity and their shared belief in a theocratic society makes this a far worse enemy than the Vietminh. 

And the subsequent money quote:

I cannot see how any self-respecting Republican can look at this record without wincing and moaning with shame or how any former friend of the Vietnamese can equate them with either a fascist dictatorship or a nihilistic Islamist death-squad campaign. And now Bush has joined forces with anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan in making the two struggles morally equivalent.