No, Iraq is not Vietnam?

After looking through many articles stating that Iraq is not a new Vietnam and discussing the topic with my professor, I have found many repetitive reasons which are as follows. The first and most reoccurring point is that just as in Vietnam, the U.S. is fighting an unwinnable war in Iraq. But in Vietnam, the U.S. faced a single challenger, who won because America did not. In Iraq, the U.S. can't win, but neither can anyone else. Those who believe that this is a war between the U.S. and "jihadists" ignore the reality that there are multiple armed conflicts under way in Iraq, and many of those fighting the U.S. are also fighting each other. Another point is that during the Vietnam conflict there was a draft in place and soldiers were in high supply. Because of this most soldiers were on active duty in Vietnam for no longer than 15 months, yet soldiers involved in the Iraq conflict have returned to the country to serve more than one session adding up to well beyond 15 months. Another reasoning is that the communist regime that was put in place in Vietnam, after the U.S. sponsored government was overthrown, has been advancing forward in its country's social and economic issues while in Iraq the insurgency, or the opposing side to the U.S., has crippled reconstruction efforts, leaving Iraq pumping less oil and producing less electricity two years after its “liberation” than it was doing before Saddam was ousted. Also, the fact that the Vietnamese people weren't divided terribly by different ethnicities as those in Iraq are.

Tony Karon from TIME magazine said it best, "Both the conservatives and the liberals seem to share the same epistemological flaw: They insist on understanding Iraq through the prism of American experiences — traumatic, in the case of the liberals; triumphant in the case of the conservatives — rather than engaging with Iraq’s own history and context...Iraq is less like Vietnam and more like Chernobyl, a nuclear reactor in meltdown, whose fallout may be even more dangerous than the fires that burn at its core."