Iraq is like Vietnam . . .

primarily in how it’s being presented by the media.

That’s not me saying it, it’s coming from respected military historian John Keegan, writing in the U.K.’s Telegraph[*1] :

The recent upsurge of violence in Iraq in no wayresembles the Tet offensive. At Tet, the Vietnamese new year, the NorthVietnamese People’s Army simultaneously attacked 40 cities and towns inSouth Vietnam, using 84,000 troops. Of those, the communists lost45,000 killed. No such losses have been recorded in Iraq at any placeor any time. The Tet offensive proved to be a military disaster for theVietnamese communists. It left them scarcely able to keep up theirlong-running, low-level war against the South Vietnamese government andthe American army.

Indeed, insofar as Tet was adefeat for the United States and for the South Vietnamese government,it was because the American media decided to represent it as such. Ithas become a cliché to say that Vietnam was a media war, but so it was.Much of the world media were hostile to American involvement from thestart, particularly in France, which had fought and lost its ownVietnam war in 1946-54. The defeat of Dien Bien Phu rankled with theFrench and there were few who wanted to see the Americans win wherethey had failed.

It was, however, the Americanrather than the foreign media who decided on the verdict. The Americanmedia had begun by supporting the war. As it dragged on, however,without any end in sight and with the promised military victoryconstantly postponed, American newspapers and — critically — theevening television programmes began to treat war news as a bad story.

Emphasis mine.

The main difference between Vietnam and Iraq is that with Iraq, the media were never really in support of the war.