WE'RE GLAD IT'S NOT TURNING INTO ANOTHER VIETNAM: Since the more hawkish blogs had spent the run-up to the Iraq war making it clear that Iraq wasn't going to be another Vietnam, we've been wondering how they've managed to square their determination that such a thing wouldn't happen with the slightly unfortunate never-ending rumble of continued guerilla attacks on US and Western targets over the last few months. Of course, they're not being quite as honest as to say "well, who knew the bleeding-heart liberals would be right on this one?", but frantically sawing-up opinions to reformat exactly what has happened and display it as being not Vietnam-like in the least:

It's not like Vietnam because in Vietnam, there was anything up to 500 deaths a day

It's not like Vietnam because, hey, Vietnam wasn't like Vietnam

Erm... it's not like Vietnam because we have got much more accurate weapons.

And so on. The trouble is, while it's really easy to pull differences between Vietnam and Iraq out of the air - Iraq isn't in Asia; the Iraq war hasn't been the backdrop for the pilot of a TV series about Soldiers of Fortune called The A Team - it's just so much squirming. Because everybody knows what we meant by "It'll turn into another Vietnam" - the war would become a drawn-out tale of sniping, and death, and while the clash of the armies might well run the American's way, it'd prove almost impossible to stem the flow of small groups of pro-Saddam loyalists carrying out any number of handkerchief-scale attacks on Western targets.