Politico Tuesday

The coming weeks will be politically charged as Congress returns to session this week and General Petraeus's progress report on the troop surge in Iraq is due next week. The posturing has already begun on both sides.

Gene Robinson has a really good take on President Bush's statement last week comparing Iraq and Vietnam.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/03/AR2007090300802.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Bush, Rove, Dick Cheney and the other principal architects of the Iraq war never served in Vietnam -- in fact, they went to great lengths to put distance between themselves and the military adventure they now describe as both necessary and noble. At the moment, though, I'm less concerned about their hypocrisy than their distortion of history.

To say the United States should not have withdrawn its forces from Vietnam is to say that there was something those forces could have done -- something beyond napalm, carpet-bombing, destroying villages in order to save them -- that would have led to some kind of "victory." Of course, Bush and the others don't say what that special something might have been, because they don't know. They're seeing nothing but a historical mirage.