I was going to write something about Bush’s historical reflections the other day, in which he compared Iraq to Vietnam, but decided there’s no point. Plenty of others have already done it.

The incident has served a useful purpose however because it’s illustrated yet again how irrational is the world view of the neo-con maddies. Here for example is blogger and sometime radio show host Dean Barnett:

… we could have stayed the course in Vietnam until the South had become sustainable, just as we had done in South Korea a couple of decades earlier.

Now I don’t want to take issue with the bit about Vietnam, except to say that it depends on a set of heroic assumptions for which there is little empirical evidence. No surprises there then, the neo-cons have established time without number that they believe in allowing hope to triumph over experience.

No, the bit I wanted to highlight is the comment about Korea. Reviewing the history of that sad peninsular:

- The North tried to reunify the country and over-ran most of the South;
- The UN declared this was a bad thing and organised a multi-national (mainly US) force to help the South, which sent the North packing and threatened to defeat it entirely;
- The Chinese decided this wasn’t in their interests, and sent troops to help the North, who kicked the UN forces out of the place and nearly over-ran the South again;
- A truce was finally declared with the opposing forces more or less where they’d been before the whole mess began;
- The US has had troops stationed there ever since;
- North Korea has become a rogue state; it’s (probably) developed nuclear weapons and remains the source of endless tension in the Asia Pacific. The cost of containing North Korea for 50+ years must amount to tens of billions of dollars and as of August 2007, there is no end in sight to the regional instability that the situation in Korea is causing.

Yet Dean Barnett apparently thinks this is a tale of triumphant achievement for the US of A. He thinks they should have done the same thing in Vietnam (disregarding the fact that the fighting in Korea lasted 3 years as opposed to 30 in Vietnam if you count the initial war to kick out the French). Sure Dean, that would have been a terrific idea. Your country could have had 50,000 troops strung around Saigon to this day while the North Vietnamese tested the nuclear weapons that they’d been developing for the last 30 years, probably in consort with their buddies in North Korea. That would have been a brilliant outcome and I understand completely why you regret that it never happened.

Oh wait, actually I’m being unfair to ol’ Deano. He doesn’t think that’s what would have happened at all.

North Vietnam was about to break, until America’s will broke first.

Yep, it was all the fault of those damn liberals and their lack of will. If only they’d hung tough for another few months, Hanoi would have run up the white flags and begged for a good dose of yankee capitalism.

Needless to say there’s no empirical evidence for Dean’s fantasy. It’s just another instance of wishing facts into existence to accommodate his preferred view of the world.

So where does that leave the USA in Iraq, in Dean’s Second Life fantasy? Well staying there pretty much forever of course.

… we are in a war that is open-ended. It’s a disquieting reality, but it’s reality nonetheless. Shrinking from it won’t make the situation any more tolerable.

‘Disquieting’. Yeah, Dean, I think that’s a reasonable description.

I wish the MSM would start trying to nail Howard and Rudd on this stuff but foreign policy no longer seems to interest our local hacks. They’re too busy pursuing the really important issues, like who’s editing Wikipedia and how many MPs can pole-dance on Glenn Milne’s head.

I hope the gap year kids in our army insist on getting proper body armour.