Vietnam

I've recently been reading "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers" by Daniel Ellsberg. I'm maybe a fourth of the way into it but, already, it's chilling. The story is enough on its own: policy decisions made behind closed doors in the pentagon, intelligence spun for political ends, analysis of alternatives to war kept secret, and outright lying to the public. But what's especially chilling is how much it all smells like the situation in Iraq. The characterization of the Viet Cong as "terrorists" is a particularly interesting paralell. Tom Friedman recently dismissed the comparison of those attacking US troops in Iraq to the Viet Cong and compared them instead to the Khmer Rouge. However, that dismissal seems inadequate in light of what I've been reading.