Iraq is Not Vietnam

There are almost no similarities between the Vietnam War and the Iraq War, except that in both cases we got "bogged down" and our civilian leaders micromanaged the military. After Laos went Communist, our "macho" president, JFK, decided to put his foot down with South Vietnam so as to stop further dominoes from falling.

Most people think JFK was a great president - well I don't. For sure, he was charismatic and all that, but he was also reckless and "macho", as shown by the Cuban Missile Crisis. (I'll leave out the Bay of Pigs, since he inherited that from the Eisenhower Administration.) He also had Addison's Disease, and was injected with God-knows-what by Dr. "Feel-Good". But I digress.

In Vietnam there was a Civil War of sorts going on, and we decided to help shore up the South Vietnamese government. We also apparently gave the "green light" in 1963 to the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem. McNamara, JFK and LBJ saw our support in terms of the Cold War, since the North Vietnamese, under Ho Chi Minh, were in many ways, Russian/Soviet "puppets."

The problem with all this is that there had already been a "Communist takeover" of sorts after the defeat of the French by the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, in which Ike had declined to intervene. So we helped the South Vietnamese stymie full implementation of the resulting Geneva Accords.

It is interesting to note that there were at least two "flavors" of the Anti-War Movement in the late '60's and early 70's. The first, (call it Com) influenced by Communists, wanted us out, but they also supported the North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front (NLF) to the hilt. Jane Fonda epitomized this group. The second (call it Trot), influenced by Trotskyites, also wanted us out, but they had no use for the North Vietnamese, because Leon Trotsky had broken with Stalin in the 1930's

At any rate, after coming to Wayne State University as a math professor in 1971, I joined a Com-flavored group. In retrospect, it was run in a rather Stalinist fashion. Although I had been a "red diaper baby", I was unaware of the distinction between these two different flavors. and I was chastised severely once for coming to a meeting of my Com-flavored group wearing an "Out Now" button, the hallmark of the Trot flavor. I should add parenthetically that I never condoned the torture of our POW's by the North Vietnamese nor the insulting of our GI's who were home on leave.