I respectfully disagree.

Submitted by John Philips (Japan), Nov 12, 2006 at 22:04

"The implications of that failure, as in Vietnam, will primarily be domestic"

I respectfully disagree here. Iraq, unlike Vietnam, has larger nationalisms that it interacts with, specifically Arab and Islamic nationalisms. That is what makes it much more consequential and much more dangerous. There are real dominoes beside Iraq. In Vietnam we could withdraw precipitously and (as you say) the implications were primarily domestic.

In Iraq we need a very deft hand with a lot of foreign policy and military expertise to very carefully extract American troops. Bush is the wrong man, but unfortunately he's the only president we've got. The only question is how badly he can mess things up in his last two years.

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