As a Vietnam veteran, I can tell you first hand that there is NO similarity between Iraq and Vietnam. In Vietnam, America had no national leadership that was competent and willing to pursue victory (i.e., Johnson/McNamara). By the time Nixon came into office, a military victory was all but impossible to achieve due not to military capabilities, but due to political realities plus the fact that we had to also consider two massive, nuclear armed Communist allies of North Vietnam, i.e., the Soviet Union and Communist China.

In Vietnam, a Communist fifth column was encouraged and supported, and that is why thousands of anti-American seditionists and rioters took to the streets and began the demoralization process of our troops, their families and the public in general.  Communist General Giap himself expressed 'thanks' to those so-called 'peace protesters' for helping Hanoi ultimately win the war.

The fact is, Vietnam fell to the Communists in 1975 because a Democratic U.S. Congress refused to authorize any military assistance to our allies in Saigon. President Gerald Ford was unwilling to defy the Congress to support a U.S. ally which was still a member in good standing with SEATO (NATO's southeast asian counterpart organization) as late as 1975. The fall of South Vietnam became inevitable in the vacuum created by a combination of a weak President (Ford), a cowardly Democrat Congress, and the lies of the Communists who never intended to honor the infamous 'Paris Peace Accords'.

I reiterate: there is NO similarity between Iraq and Vietnam, the defeatists and disillusioned John Kerry voters notwithstanding.

On to Iraq. The situation in Iraq is nothing like Vietnam because there is the will to WIN, the naysayers and chicken littles notwithstanding. President Bush has stated that we will not leave Iraq until the Iraqi people have a stable, democratic system in place. Now 'CAPS' has made a number of statements that are simply not accurate.  It was stated that the cause for liberating Iraq was due to 'Saddam's nuclear weapons program', and that is false. The cause was Saddam's failure to comply with U.N. resolutions that HE SIGNED at the end of the first Gulf War in 1991.  The claim that Bush stated that Saddam had nuclear weapons in his State of the Union speech is a LIE - Bush said no such thing, and even a casual review of this SOTU speech will prove that.

Space does not permit a complete refutation of the inaccuracies in CAPS post. Suffice it to say, there is a tendency to play fast and loose with the facts, especially when there is an insurgency going on, trying desperately to derail the elections scheduled for next month in Iraq.  A statement was made that most Iraqis do not want the U.S. in their country, but that does not explain the thousands upon thousands of Iraqis who cheered, cried and waved to our troops when Saddam was run out of town, and their country liberated. Like their past counterparts in America 30+ years ago, in Iraq there is again, a 'great Silent Majority' that not only supports the U.S. efforts to rebuild Iraq, but are glad to see that America is not failing them as we did at the end of the Gulf War in 1991, when we failed to overthrow Saddam when we should have.

And contrary to CAPS assertion, it isn't 'pride' that is on the line in Iraq, it is the concept of bringing freedom and liberty to people who have had NONE for too many years. In the 4 years that President Bush has been in office, over 50 million Muslims have been freed from the tyranny of Islamofascist regimes like the Taliban and Saddam. And Libya folded it's cards and renounced it's own programs of WMD because Col. Khadaffy saw the handwriting on the wall.

CAPS states that if a terrorist group acquired a nuclear weapon for use against the United States, that there would be no way to trace it's source. This too, is not true. The U.S. Government has the ability to analyze the trace elements from a nuclear detonation, be it actual fusion/fission or a 'dirty bomb' and determine where the fissionable materials originated from, because any device leaves a distinctive 'fingerprint', and that means that any such weapons, should they be used, would be traced back to their point of origin, and that origin would cease to exist on the face of the Earth, and rightly so.

CAPS makes a passing comment about 'right wing zealots' (which reveals a bit about his own point of view), but this isn't about right or left wing, it is about right and wrong. Allowing Saddam to continue to ignore U.N. resolutions which required him to divest himself of all WMD programs was WRONG. America, since the rest of the U.N. was corrupt and bought off BY Saddam, refused to play that sad game any more, and now Saddam sits in a jail cell, as he should.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban's brutal regime kept the Afghan people in a state of hopelessness, oppression and despair. Now, they have held free elections for the first time in their history, and their long dark national nightmare is ending. To have left Mullah Omar and his thugs in power would also have been WRONG. Thank God that we have a man in the Oval Office who understands the difference between right and wrong.

There are some who choose to believe that Islamic people are not capable of living in a democracy, and/or they do not aspire to democracy. That is the height of bigotry, to assume that such people are automatically blinded to the concepts of freedom and liberty due to their own cultural background. Shame on anyone who promotes such thinking.

CAPS concludes by saying they cannot support a policy that "makes no sense from a military point of view", and unless CAPS is sitting in on meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (which I have, in past years prior to my retirement in 2002), he lacks the information and knowledge to make such a judgment.

Ron Hyatt, USN (retired)