Why Iraq is and is not analogous to Vietnam

Michael Barone makes an excellent point in his column today.

And withdrawal from Iraq would be vastly more dangerous than withdrawal from Vietnam turned out to be.

To be sure, our withdrawal from Vietnam was bad for the Vietnamese. There was, contrary to Kerry's prediction at the time, a bloodbath, and the Vietnamese lived under a cruel communist dictatorship. But the dominoes did not fall beyond Indochina because, unnoticed by war backers and opponents, other East Asian states -- South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia -- were launching a free-market economic boom. The Vietnam War gave them time to get started. These countries had rule of law and in time developed democracies.

Iraq is not in such a good neighborhood.

Nearby are Iran, the leading supporter of international terrorism, busy developing nuclear weapons; Syria, headquarters of many terrorist groups; and Saudi Arabia, where petrodollars are used to disseminate totalitarian Wahhabism around the world. Premature withdrawal from Iraq would give terrorists more space and time to plan and prepare attacks on us beyond Iraq, and a visible defeat for the United States would exhilarate the followers of Osama bin Laden and other Islamofascist terrorists. It would leave unprotected the brave Iraqis who risked death to vote in three elections and held up their purple fingers in triumph.

It should be noted that Vietnam was not in the strategic location that Iraq is. In abandoning our allies in South Vietnam, we gave the country to our enemies but it did not harm us in the big picture of the Cold War. The same would certainly happen to Iraq if we tucked tail and ran, only it would seriously harm us in our fight against Islamism. Iran would easily be able to control a belt across the Middle East, and with nukes in a couple of years they would likely be able to dominate the rest of the region. He who controls the Middle East controls the primary energy source of the world economy. Period. And he who commands that much control over the world economy also controls you and I.