Word: vietnamize
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...FREED. THICH QUANG DO, 74, prominent Vietnamese Buddhist dissident; from house arrest; in Ho Chi Minh City. Do, a leader of the banned Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, had been confined to a monastery since 2001 for agitating for religious freedom and human rights. A Communist Party newspaper said Do was released because of the government's "humanitarian policies." But some observers speculated the authorities might be trying to blunt the strong international condemnation over the recent 13-year jailing of another dissident, Pham Hong...
...main reason for the sudden surge in Vietnam analogies may be that U.S. troops, having deposed Saddam, find themselves facing a growing guerrilla insurgency. Soldiers are dying every other day in sniper shootings, grenade attacks and ambushes in Baghdad and cities to the north and west. And despite some initial reluctance to acknowledge the scale, U.S. officials are now admitting they're facing an organized campaign...
...While Iraq is a very different situation from the one that confronted the U.S. military in Vietnam - the enemy has no regional or international backers to support and sustain its insurgency; the terrain and technological capability of the U.S. precludes any concentration of forces; as long as the rebellion remains confined to Sunnis its maximum political support base is no bigger than 15 percent of the population - it's the idea of U.S. troops confronting an enemy indistinguishable from an often hostile civilian population that gets alarm bells ringing. A report in London's Evening Standard last week contained disturbing...
...most worrisome comparison for the Bush administration may be in the duration. Vietnam, after all, saw U.S. troops tied down on a distant battlefield for ten years. Although he did his best before the war to downplay suggestions by uniformed officers that an Iraq occupation mission would be long and costly, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz now appears ready to acknowledge that U.S. troops could be there for the next ten years, and will probably require the construction of permanent bases - and also that together with the Afghanistan mission, the Iraq security mission will likely cost around $54 billion...
...Vietnam comparisons may exist mostly in our heads - both the soldiers obsessed with imagery from "Full Metal Jacket" and "Apocalypse Now," and a media corps looking for simple analogies to describe complex problems. But what they do reveal is a growing anxiety over the long-term nature of the Iraq occupation. Nor is there much comfort in the observation by those coalition-of-the-willing Spanish, who are finally sending 1,100 troops to join the fray in Iraq, that the situation there is not at all like Vietnam. No, says the daily El-Mundo, it's more like...