There is a similarity between Viet Nam and Iraq ...
In 1954, the French attempted to colonialize Viet Nam (objective: the rubber forests). The Vietamese would have nothing of it and gave them the boot (Dien Bien Phu). We tried the same thing (failing to learn from the French) and achieved the same result. We were defeated by the oldest known tactic in warfare: guerilla opposition.
While we were carpet bombing the Vietnamese countryside, we were summarily increasing the hostility of those surviving civilians to our presence. Enter the guerillas ... hit and run, blend into the population, disappear! To retaliate, we just mow down the entire crowd of people into which they assimilated themselves. That tactic has shown to unite the various factions of the opposition into a unified population with a unifying cause: to defeat the invading infidels.
Similarily, the British attempted to colonialize Iraq, attempted to establish a colonial government encompassing the three primary tribes of Iraq. They attempted to instill a western style democracy on a primarily Muslim populace with little regard to established customs and beliefs. That failed.
In both instances, we seem to have ignored the lessons of history.
Our activities in Southeast Asia were promulgated primarily on the belief put forth by Eisenhower: The fall of any one democratic nation in Asia will have a domino effect that will foster the growth of communism around the world. Well ... that was wrong too.
Then (Viet Nam) and now (Iraq), our activities in those countries were/are shrouded in lies and deceit by our government.
Lyndon Johnson hoodwinked the American press and the public into believing our march to war was was justified. We had been attacked by North Vietnamese gunboats. And again, as then, Bush and Company has fed the American public and press (and the world) a trough of lies to justify a highly questionable and poorly planned invasion and occupation of a soverign country.
The nightly news in 1968 showed images of B52s saturation bombing the Vietnamese countryside and reported on Viet Cong body counts. We rarely saw similiar images of the body bags coming home or the thousands of wounded in hospital at Subic Bay.
The policies in place then were gradually overturned by an upwelling of public opinion. Robert Macnamara, then Secretary of Defense, said as early as 1967 that we had failed to properly account for the differences in ethnicity, customs, and beliefs, that we had failed to empathize with the goals and objectives of the Vietnamese people and the country we were attempting to occupy and should consider withdrawing. That was 1967!! -- we continued on with our slaughter of each other for five more years. (And Macnamara was ostracized for his beliefs)
Our technically superior "shock and awe" campaign in Iraq has been replaced, again, by an inept attempt to colonialize and unify a country consisting mainly of disparate tribes with differing beliefs that have resisted such efforts for thousands of years. They are suspicious of one another, they don't trust one another, and have only one seemingly unifying direction at this point: They trust us less and they want less of us than their tribal rivals.
And we exacerbated the problem by attempting to put one of our puppets in place as the leader of the now almost defunct "Iraqi Governing Council".
"Last year the neocons tried to install Mr. Chalabi in power, even ferrying his private army into Iraq just behind our advancing troops. It turned out that he had no popular support, and by now it's obvious that suspicions that we're trying to put Mr. Chalabi on the throne are fueling Iraqi distrust." NY Times - April 13, 2004.
And again, in Iraq as in Viet Nam, we chose to invoke a unilateral action against a soverign country on false pretenses. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution was based on a sham -- there were no torpedo attacks on the USS Maddox ...
http://www.fair.org/media-beat/940727.html
And it might be noted also that no nation with whom we were allied at that time chose to join us in Viet Nam.
And in 2003, another unilateral action against a soverign country, without allied support, without allied involvement. And there were no WMDs in Iraq, there were no nuclear weapons, and the leader of that country was off writing romance novels.
And again our major allies want no part of the killing of their sons and daughters on behalf of one of America's questionable conquests. We have squandered our good will around the world.
Again, Robert Macnamara: If the US is about to engage in such a sobering enterprise as the invasion of another country and cannot enlist the support of other nations and allies who maintain similar beliefs, ethics, and morals as our own, then perhaps we should rethink what we are about to do.