Bush Defends His War

It has been talked about for a few weeks in Washington and has been all over the blogs, and now it has come to pass: Bush has compared Iraq to Vietnam.

I could summarize various articles about this, but you would probably be best off by reading the one written by Michael A. Fletcher of the Washington Post.

In my opinion, this is a gross over-simplication of matters. While no war is the same, there are a few that are similar, but I do not think Vietnam and Iraq are similar enough to warrant comparison. True, both wars were/are unwinnable. (By that, I mean that we have no clear goal, and thus can never achieve success.) But the world has changed a lot since Vietnam and we are not fighting just one enemy. Furthermore, a majority of the people are not in agreement with us. When we entered Vietnam, most of those who we set out to help pretty much didn't have a problem with America and our way of life. The Middle East is different; people there have a fundamental problem with Western society. We are not fighting one group of opressors but an entire ideology. This is a battle that we cannot understand, let alone win, and needs to be settled internally. I agree with most of the Democratic presidential nominees that we should have forces present to keep somewhat of a calm, but we should not be taking full control of the war and trying to find solutions ourselves.