Old Blue: The Iraqis would have fallen on their faces and we would have witnessed helicopters taking off from roofs in the Green Zone filled with Americans, Press, and selected Iraqis fleeing for their lives as the various parties moved in to carve Iraq into fiefdoms.

The difference between Iraq and Vietnam is as stark as night and day. In Iraq we are attempting to hold together three factions in one nation. In Vietnam we were trying to prevent the unification of two factions into one nation. In Iraq we faced an “insurgency” that was really a few thousand foreign infiltrators using suicide tactics with no real support from the populace and only a tenouous supply chain to Iran or Syria. In Vietnam we faced a true insurgency (the Vietcong), supplied though Laos and Cambodia by a belligerent who was a fully operational state (North Vietnam), all backed up by our Cold War adversary (USSR).