Political propaganda about success in the Vietnam war made the politicians look like fools when the truth began to become known.

In the commentary excerpted below, Sydney Blumenthal draws some parallels between the “We’re winning” propaganda as regards Iraq and the “We’re winning” propaganda we used in Vietnam.

Bush and company are resorting to body counts, giving daily numbers of “insurgents” killed or captured.

They did this in Vietnam, under the false assumption that the supply of guerillas was very limited. “They can’t sustain those losses” went the mantra of the blindly optimistic, or the deluded.

As we saw in Vietnam and we are seeing in Iraq, the supply of insurgents/guerillas is endless in comparison with our ability to kill them all.

And our efforts to kill them all require such an oppressive presence in Iraq that we are making more guerillas all the time. Or else, Iran and Syria are sending more over to us.

But I doubt that Iran and Syria are sending us very many insurgents. I don’t doubt for a minute that the Bush Administration would trumpet gloriously if they killed a bunch of Syrian citizens or Iranian citizens who were fighting in Iraq.

I conclude that Bush isn’t finding very many foreign nationals fighting in Iraq, at least not yet. I could be wrong and the So-Called Liberal Media and FoxNews are all engaged in a cover-up to embarrass the Bush administration (but I don’t think so).

Guardian | Blinded by the light at the end of the tunnel

Lang, who served as an intelligence officer in Vietnam, observes: “For almost all of the war, Vietnam was a better situation than Iraq. During the conduct of the war the security situation was far better than this.” The Iraqi elections are “irrelevant to the outcome of the war because the people who voted were the people who stood to gain”.

Iran is the long-term winner. “Iran intends to pull the Shia state of Iraq into its orbit. You can be sure that Iranian revolutionary guards are honeycombed throughout Iraq’s intelligence to make sure things don’t get out of hand.” About the “euphoria” after the election, especially echoed by the press corps, Lang simply says: “Laughable, comical, pathetic.”

Bush’s Iraq syndrome is a reinvention of Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam syndrome. In December 1967, Walt Rostow, LBJ’s national security adviser, famously declared about the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese: “Their casualties are going up at a rate they cannot sustain … I see light at the end of the tunnel.” The official invitation to the New Year’s Eve party at the US embassy in Saigon read: “Come see the light at the end of the tunnel.” The Tet offensive struck a month later.