Is Iraq another Vietnam

I was thinking a lot last night about Iraq and Vietnam. Those of us who are even nominally Republican have to admit that George Bush blew it in the Iraq invasion and initial management of the war. It was not the right response to destroy the jihad that brought us the horrors of September 11^th, 2001. He was badly advised by Rumsfeld and even Cheney. He later made the pretty courageous decision to go with a military surge under General Petraeus and wound up leaving Iraq in stable condition with tenuous but hopeful prospects. At the time of the full troop withdrawal in 2011 Obama labeled Iraq as "sovereign, stable and self-reliant". After the withdrawal, the jihadists reemerged to fill the vacuum and we all know the rest. Now we are back in with 5000 "advisers", without any Status of Forces Agreement, and with war raging.

For those of us old enough to have participated in the social unrest of the Vietnam War era this situation has an eerie ring.  The few thousand troops initially sent by Kennedy were "advisers" also, meant only to help the South Vietnamese government defeat its enemy on its own. Johnson took over after Kennedy's death and then swamped Goldwater in 1964 in an election in which television ads convinced the public that the Republican was a warmonger who would lead us into a nuclear holocaust. But when things turned bad for the South Vietnamese it was the Democrat who converted it to an American war and escalated it. The U.S. superpower, whose leaders fought with politics in mind and an unengaged public, was defeated by a badly outgunned but highly ideologically motivated enemy.  The defeat was a destructive humiliation for our country and a disaster for the people of southeast Asia.

President Obama came to office as a peacemaker, and was even awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on the strength of his oratory. He gave conciliatory speeches in the United Nations, tried a Russian reset, withdrew our planned missile defense sites from eastern Europe and whispered to Medvedev to reassure Vladimir that he would be more flexible after his reelection. But peace has not come to the Middle East, with virtually every country worse than it was, Iran on the ascendency, not to mention Russia, China and North Korea. Candidate Clinton was part of these events and seems likely to continue on in this vein. If anything she seems more bellicose than does Trump. He has promised to fight ISIS with vigor and to strengthen our military but otherwise seems less inclined to engage in military entanglements. He expresses a preference to get along with the Russians rather than to accuse and threaten them.

As I said what's happening in the Middle East today smells a little like what was going on in Vietnam during the 60's. I hope for our sake that I'm wrong.