Don't mention Vietnam, baby boomers, Iraq is a very different war - Opinion

The Soviets, a military superpower controlled by the Communist Party, invaded Afghanistan and lost that war just as easily as the USA lost the Vietnam War. They didn't lose because their liberal media or leftist anti-war movement undercut the will to win or that their leaders wavered. The Soviets lost Afghanistan because they had poorly defined objectives and operated with an ignorance of the Afghanistan's ungovernable history.

So read thus Australian opinion piece and think about the Soviet Afghanistan occupation. Why did they lose?

Don't mention Vietnam, baby boomers, Iraq is a very different war - Opinion: "Vietnam was a defining war not just for those who opposed it.
For the budding neo-conservatives, some of whom had initially been opposed to the intervention in Vietnam, and who would become a major intellectual influence during the Reagan presidency and later, of course, in the Bush Administration, Vietnam and in particular the nature of the anti-war movement was their great awakening.
The Vietnam War was lost because America had lost confidence in itself, because the '60s cultural revolution, of which the anti-war movement was a part, had undermined American institutions and shared values.
For them, the lesson of Vietnam was not that the war was a mistake based on a fatal misunderstanding of Vietnamese nationalism and the historic antipathy between Vietnam and China, which meant the war was always going to become a bloody, aimless quagmire.
Instead, never again meant that never again should the US fight a war that it was not prepared to see through to victory, and that US security depended on a confident and assertive, militarily unassailable America.
To be confronted with the accusation that - far from fulfilling their pledge of never again - the mistakes of Vietnam are being repeated in Iraq, enrages the intellectual architects of the Bush doctrine of a confident, engaged and dominant America spreading democracy and freedom, if necessary, by armed force.
In the wake of the reality of regime change in Iraq, the ascendancy of the neo-conservatives and their faith in American power and American exceptionalism that, in part, came from their reaction to Vietnam, is over.
But Iraq is not Vietnam and the world of 2005 is nothing like the world of 1968. There are no lessons from Vietnam that apply to Iraq. And the Cold War, which was the context and the pretext for the American intervention in Vietnam, shares no similarities with the war on terrorism.
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