Iraq is Vietnam and Bush is Nixon

So goes today's editorial in the Washington Post. Of course, they try hard to insist otherwise, but you can't draw any other conclusions from the Defeaticrat press. See if you agree:

On June 8, 1969, President Richard M. Nixon announced the withdrawal of 25,000 American troops from Vietnam. Within the next few months, he would declare that tens of thousands more were coming home. "He was reluctant to withdraw," says John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University and the author of several books on war and public opinion, "but he kept being pushed by politics."

Nixon recognized that, without U.S. military support, the government of South Vietnam would fall to the communist insurgency, and he believed that such a fall would represent a humiliating and costly defeat for the United States. "But Nixon realized that his approval ratings would slip fast unless he made progress in bringing the boys home," writes Stanley Karnow in "Vietnam: A History." American officials searching for a "breaking point" in Vietnam had found one, but what had broken was not the insurgency. It was U.S. public opinion: Americans no longer believed the war was worth it.

President Bush may not know it yet -- or, then again, he may -- but in Iraq he is about to do a Nixon. Psychologically and politically, the withdrawal phase has already begun. Militarily, the pullback will start within weeks, or at most months, of the Dec. 15 Iraqi parliamentary elections.

They even include a glowering photo of Nixon with the piece. How better to tie up the connection, which they try to deny later in the piece.

Iraq, of course, is not Vietnam, and Bush is not Nixon. Bush owns the Iraq war and won re-election promising to stick it out, whereas Nixon inherited the war in Vietnam and ran for office promising to end it. Although Bush shares with Nixon a fierce determination not to pull out without winning something that plausibly resembles victory, it is Bush who arguably has more personal and political credibility on the line. He therefore may be willing to hold out against public opinion longer and more doggedly than Nixon did, and his party's control of Congress -- which Nixon did not have -- may help him do so.

Nonetheless, not even the most stubborn of presidents could hold out for long against a decisive shift in the public's attitude toward the war. The structure of public opinion suggests that such a shift has taken place.

In other words, because public opinion has been beaten into submission on the war by the constant negative drumbeat of the press - and the White House failure to conteract it until just recently - the president should just give up and pull out. We should now govern by public opinion polls.

To the Washington Post: Why don't you go back and read Sen. Lieberman's piece in your arch-rival Wall Street Journal. I doubt that you even reported much at all on Joe's parting ways with his party's Defeaticrat position. You might learn what's actually going on in Iraq, and the tremendous successes that our political and military forces have brought about.