Vietnam

An occasional series deploring pundits' determination to treat the curret Afghan campaign as though it were a replay of the Vietnam War. Today's episode disappoints me since I have a considerable regard for Ben Macintyre. Nevertheless, his column in the Times today is, right from the get-go, a classic of the genre: An unquiet ghost stalks the White House Situation Room as Barack Obama, increasingly Hamlet-like, ponders what to do in Afghanistan: it is the spectre of the Vietnam War, America’s enduring historical hang-up. Oh dear. The most important parallels with Vietnam are neither tactical nor practical, but cultural and emotional. Americans are not backward-looking by nature, but the trauma of Vietnam is seared on the national memory like no other event in US history.

So, you see, Barack Obama is a Democratic president just like Jack Kennedy and LBJ and, right, there's a war going on in Aghanistan which is in asia, just like Vietnam! So the parallels are just uncanny. Right? Wrong. It's time, people. for a comprehensive ban on making facile comparisons between Afghanistan and Vietnam. Prospect's Tom Streithorst is only the latest fellow to warn that Afghanistan "could destroy Obama’s presidency, as Vietnam did Johnson’s." This seems extremely unlikely. Let's trot through some of the reasons: 1. 50,000 Americans died in Vietnam. The current figure for Afghanistan? 796. There may be quite a number of troops involved but Afghanistan is, by the standards of these things, a small and non-deadly war.