"South Vietnam" was an American puppet state, just like Manchukuo was for Japan , or 1920 Iraq was for the Brits. It was created by us after the French gave up the war as lost. (By the way, Gen. Giap said that the French, with much more local knowledge than the US, as well as a good stock of ex-Nazi Foreign Legionnaires, were a tougher fight than the US forces were.) We didn't try to "save" a friendly RSVN, we created it , mostly because Kissinger said it was necessary to undermine the Soviets in Europe. It is a very good analogy to Iraq...

You've missed the salient points of my previous comment.

point 1) From my earlier comment:

Questions of the legitimacy of the succession of various RVN regimes or the level of popular support for the American presence aside

I explicitly qualified my remarks to set the controversies about the initial partition of Vietnam, and popular legitimacy of the South Vietnamese government aside. My reason for setting those issues aside was because those events took place in the years 1954-1956, without being forced by U.S. military intervention- thus placing those events outside the specific focus of my comment.

What part of "set aside" don't you get?

point 2) I'll try to make this easier for you.

The USA did not mount an aggressive invasion of South Vietnam. The USA did mount an aggressive invasion of Iraq. Full scale.

Here's the summary of my contention that there are such wide disparities between the cases of Vietnam and Iraq that in most respects, it makes a poor fit as an analogy as a historical case.

Case A: The South Vietnamese government headed by Ngo Dinh Diem was in place before the U.S. put troops on the ground in South Vietnam. A state of friendly relations existed between the Diem regime and the US government. Diem invited/agreed to U.S. military involvement prior to their presence in the country. We did not invade the nation of South Vietnam in order to obtain either the initial U.S. presence on the ground, or the massive military installations that were later built there.

Case B: The "Iraqi Interim Government" initially headed by Allawi was put in place after a massive U.S.-led invasion of the country. The previous government of Iraq, headed by Saddam Hussein, did not invite or agree to the U.S. military involvement initiated on the territory of Iraq during his regime. The Bush administration invaded the nation of Iraq, and it's obvious that they've been dictating the terms on most important governmental concerns there ever since.

My remarks were very specific. They said what they said, and didn't say what they didn't say.

Point 3) Parenthetically, I pointed out that there's nothing to be gained for Iraq critics in terms of political advantage in re-heating the Vietnam debate, because the present debacle in Iraq is so much more unequivocally worse, and so much more undeniably inexcusable, that there's no need to re-visit Vietnam in order to indict the conduct of those who support the Iraq conflict and occupation. That is a practical strategic point.

A lot of people don't seem to recognize the fact that the American Right Wing is not made at all uncomfortable by having the subject of Vietnam emerge as a topic for dispute. They view it as a chance to remind the American people of "America's only defeat" at the hands of the Liberal Enemy Within, etc. They have nothing to lose by Monday-morning quarterbacking that historical event with their favored narrative, in front of the American people- they can only gain political support with that appeal to the past.

Liberals seem to think that bringing up Vietnam always works for them. Not in the compressed time frame of electoral politics, it doesn't. Look how far bringing up Vietnam got John Kerry, for instance.

Finally- to repeat myself some more- c.2008, Republicans are only to happy to have anything to discuss, rather than the sorry outcomes of their having nearly complete control over- and responsibility for- every governmental initiative and policy of the past 8 years. (How many years did it take Bush to even pick up a pen for his first veto?) So they'll seize on any distraction, historical or otherwise. I'm sure you'll also find them more than willing to incorporate a tit-for-tat debate over the causes of the Great Depression of the 1920s into the present electoral campaign, rather than fielding questions about the role of Bush's debt spending, fuel-the-rich, starve-the-infrastructure tax policies, non-investigations of financial chicanery in the housing market, and the snowballing long-term costs of military adventurism on the present state of the economy.

Don't fall for the trap, is all I was saying. Not up to guessing why some of my fellow writers have decided to take such vehement issue with my words, reading into them what wasn't there.

My previous remarks were attempting to address the two cases of Vietnam and Iraq in terms of how the involvement began in each case, and the extent to which the local government welcomed and enabled the U.S. presence.

Therefore, they didn't address the commonalities of how in both Vietnam and Iraq, sitting U.S. administrations stifled any and all evidence they did not want to hear from their sources on the ground, analysts, and military commanders; concealed or denigrated any reportage that conflicted with their rosy propaganda scenarios; and mocked or disparaged the patriotism and fortitude of the sources of those reports, and of those who concluded that the evidence argued for a different course. Those aspects were outside of the scope of my intended focus.

Your points are well-taken, but they weren't the ones I was trying to make.