Iraq is No Vietnam

Iraq is No Vietnam

I wish that the Bush Administration would say what Thomas Friedman said last Thursday (I just returned from a professional trip and so the post is late).

He nails it with smart weapon precision when he says, "The people who mounted the attacks on the Red Cross are not the Iraqi Vietcong. They are the Iraqi Khmer Rouge — a murderous band of Saddam loyalists and Al Qaeda nihilists, who are not killing us so Iraqis can rule themselves. They are killing us so they can rule Iraqis."

I disagree with one paragraph though: "Let's get real. What the people who blew up the Red Cross and the Iraqi police fear is not that we're going to permanently occupy Iraq. They fear that we're going to permanently change Iraq. The great irony is that the Baathists and Arab dictators are opposing the U.S. in Iraq because — unlike many leftists — they understand exactly what this war is about. They understand that U.S. power is not being used in Iraq for oil, or imperialism, or to shore up a corrupt status quo, as it was in Vietnam and elsewhere in the Arab world during the cold war. They understand that this is the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the U.S. has ever launched — a war of choice to install some democracy in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world."

I think that many American leftists know very well that his is not about imperialism or oil. Even if they don't share the Baathist's philosophy, they are allied with them in their reflexive anti-Americanism.