Yea, right up there with that brilliant retort of "massively stupid editorial". Wow, adverb in front of the adjective for extra emphasis. I learn from the best
I've already gone over the reasons that this comparison was not credible in another thread. It is historically innacurate and a gross revisionist view of what took place.
It talks of the poor human rights that took place after we left Vietnam, but where is the credible review of how many lives would have been lost for us to actually
win in Vietnam?
Can you envision an occupied Vietnam? You think Iraq is a struggle, it is a walk through the tulips compared to Vietnam. We controlled some urban areas of South Vietnam. That's it! The South Vietnamese made the Iraqi police look like the SAS. The South Vietnamese Government wasn't exactly an authority on human rights either.
How many lives would have been lost for us to occupy Vietnam? We'd already killed over a million.
Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were horrible, but guess who funded them. We did.
So before you come out with this drivel, maybe take some time and think about what its saying Sirs. We were never going to win Vietnam. Once we set foot in that colonial war which we took over for France, we'd already lost. To win meant a commitment that you cannot even perceive and flunky neoconservative editorialists trying to convince people to stay in Iraq (which has merit on its own) are not explaining the realities of that war. We weren't on the cusp of victory when we decided to pull out in '74, '75. We weren't even close.
As for human rights, look at the nations we supported in Asia at the time - South Korea was a dictatorship and brutal at that. Indonesia was a horrible dictatorship that engaged in genocide. Taiwan was a fascist regime (literally, many of the elder statesmen and generals trained with the Nazis). So we weren't exactly a shining beacon of democratic glory.
Hence...this editorial is crap. A little thought put into it, and you'd recognize that as well.