Not your father's Vietnam lesson.

Libertarian blogger Robert Tracinski has a provocative piece defending Bush’s worry that any premature pull-out from Iraq will be like Vietnam. Conventional wisdom from Iraq War defenders (including The Observer’s Christopher Hitchens and me) is that Vietnam and Iraq are entirely different animals. It’s the media’s storyline that Iraq is Vietnam redux [see cartoon of press bugging Rumsfeld]. So Tracinski certainly has found a new wrinkle.

Here are Tracinski's key points:

• While America's defeat in Vietnam was seemingly a triumph for the anti-war left, which had long proclaimed the war unwinnable, the years following that defeat--the era of American retreat and "national malaise"--proved so traumatic that the American people have never wanted to repeat them. The left won the political battle over the war--but lost the peace.
  

• Bush’s citing Vietnam as an analogy to Iraq has caught the left by surprise, since the history of the Vietnam War is territory they thought they controlled. That’s why they have attempted to fit every conflict since 1975 into the Vietnam template: dishonest leaders starting a war of imperialist aggression doomed by incompetent leadership and tainted by American "war crimes" guaranteed to end in humiliating defeat.
  

• Now come books by Mark Moyar, who had access to facts that the conventional history of Vietnam, written in the 1970s and 1980s, could not have taken into account: the archives in Hanoi and Moscow. His thesis in an upcoming book, according to the New York Sun, "the North Vietnamese only attempted their 1975 attack when convinced that America would not counter this violation of the Paris Agreement." And what gave the North this confidence? Congressional resolutions passed after 1972 sharply limiting assistance to South Vietnam.
  

• This new view of how the Vietnam War ended is summed up by Max Boot, “By 1972 most of the south was judged secure and the South Vietnamese armed forces were able to throw back the Easter Offensive with help from lots of American aircraft but few American soldiers. If the US had continued to support Saigon with a small troop presence and substantial supplies, there is every reason to believe that South Vietnam could have survived....”
  

• The Democrats knocked the remaining props out from under South Vietnam. The result was the collapse of American power and credibility, combined with the "Vietnam Syndrome" that enshrined timidity as the cornerstone of American foreign policy, emboldened the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan --which gave birth to the "mujahadeen," the movement that gave Osama bin Laden his start. It also led to President Carter to stop supporting the shah of Iran, which assured the success of the Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution.