There’s so much unproductive rhetoric out there at the moment on Iraq, and it’s coming both from the left and from the right. Chuck Hagel may be right that Iraq is like Vietnam, but I worry that such a loaded historical analogy could get in the way of a strategy to turn things around just as Iraq nears its legal founding with the drafting of a constitution. Iraq may be like Vietnam, but that doesn’t mean it is Vietnam. Or have we already determined a Vietnam-like outcome, one that would likely be disastrous for Iraq itself?

However much Iraq may or may not be like Vietnam, it surely isn’t like America, which is what the Bush Administration, ever desperate to spin the Iraq to its advantage, would like us to believe. Things aren’t going well in Baghdad circa 2005? Well, things were tough back in Philadelphia circa 1787, too, weren’t they? Well, yes, but not nearly in the same way, and so the analogy is awfully strained. Is Iraq like America? It should be so lucky.