I've been seeing the word "Vietnam" used with some frequency in the international press; the conservative magazines have acknowledged the hue and cry by running pieces either denying Iraq is similar to Vietnam or pieces stating defiantly that Iraq is like Vietnam, dammit, and we should have won there too.

Here's my unconsidered opinion:

The enemy in Vietnam was the North Vietnamese, with the Viet Cong as their South Vietnamese arm and aid coming in from China and Russia, both possessors of nuclear weapons. The enemy in Iraq is the local branch of the Terrorist International. They receive funds and support from outside, but at a much smaller level than did the NVA/VC. The only states that tolerate them are rogues or have rogue elements inside them.

The enemy always had a safe base to retreat to in Vietnam. That is not true in Iraq. The Al Qaeda / Saddam Fedayeen boys in Iraq have nowhere but Fallujah and Tikrit to hide.

We lost about 55,000-60,000 men in Vietnam. In Iraq we have lost about 600 during the war and postwar combined.

During Vietnam we had some of the European states in our corner, at least sort of, because they were scared of the Russians. Now we don't. So what's the difference?

During Vietnam we weren't sure what we were doing. Now I think there's some kind of plan to isolate and go through areas where the terrorists are concentrated, but I'm still not convinced we know what we're doing. The confusion isn't nearly as great as Vietnam, during which the military leadership was clueless--as was the civilian. Still, though, I'm more than a bit worried on this front. I'm hoping to see more successes like that in Fallujah, where the foreign journalists are already talking up massacres, by the way.

As for atrocities, to my knowledge there was only one committed by Americans during the Vietnam War, and that was My Lai, an eternal disgrace to America. Some 200 innocent villagers were murdered. But that only happened once. If it'd happened more times than that someone would have talked; the reason we all heard about My Lai was because more than several people who knew what had happened blew the lid off the story, including the helicopter pilot from outside the unit who saved several lives and convinced some of the men to stop killing. There's no way you could cover up something of that degree. As for the photos of the naked girl (she lives in Vancouver now) and the ARVN officer shooting the VC in the head, we remember them because they were brutal. They were also very rare occurences, which is why you don't remember any other Vietnam photos. The Americans have not committed any atrocities in Iraq, nothing even close despite everything Beirut Bob and Tikrit Tommy have to say.

Our soldiers are professional volunteers in this war. In Vietnam many were conscripts.

That was the jungle and the rice paddies. This is the desert.

Our equipment is a hell of a lot better than theirs, not necessarily true then in the case of say, rifle patrols.

The media is trying to sabotage the war effort in both cases. Fortunately, this time we have alternative media, the Internet.

I'll bet you can think of a few hundred more comparisons or contrasts.