I agree with most of that tw, and you were right and I was wrong about a lot of things, but the Vietnam analogy is tired and thin now, having been stretched by you to apply to all of the M.E. and most of middle Asia.
There were lessons to be learned from all of history.
This piece points out the question: what year is it in the war on terror? Let's see if I can summarize it:
-- There are five major schools of thought on this question, beginning with the "1942ists," who believe that we stand in Iraq today where the U.S. stood shortly after Pearl Harbor: bogged down against a fascist enemy and duty-bound to carry on the fight to victory.
-- Over the last year, though, many conservatives have been peeling away from '42ism, joining the "1938ists" instead, for whom Iran's march toward nuclear power is the equivalent of Hitler's 1930s brinkmanship.
-- Most of the liberal ex-'42ists have joined up with the "1948ists," who share the '42ist and '38ist view of the war on terror as a major generational challenge, but insist that we should think about it in terms of Cold War-style containment and multilateralism, not Iraq-style pre-emption.
-- What unites the '48ists, too, is a desire to avoid being tarred as antiwar leftists. This is precisely the position that the "1972ists" embrace. '72ism has few mainstream politicians behind it, but a great many Americans, and it holds that George Bush is Nixon, Iraq is Vietnam, and that any attack on Iran or Syria would be equivalent to bombing Cambodia.
-- As 1972ists are to mainstream liberalism, the "1919ists" are to the political right: The old-guard faction that damns its own party's leaders as sellouts to the other side.
Article has more detail. And ends with a sixth possibility:
-- But as our crisis deepens, it's worth considering 1914ism, and with it the possibility that all of us, whatever year we think it is, are poised on the edge of an abyss that nobody saw coming.