President Bush does a disservice both to veterans of World War II and Americans who have served in Iraq by devising similarities between the two conflicts. Unlike the global struggle that ensnared the US in 1941, Iraq is a discretionary war, one that has not engaged the full resources of the US and its outcome is far from clear. Bush has compared World War II with the war against terror and the war in Iraq several times, most recently in a speech in San Diego commemorating the surrender of Japan. The analogy would provide the war in Iraq with powerful moral force - if it were true.

Had Saddam been a greater danger, the US would likely have used more than minimal force in the invasion and would have followed up with a large occupation army, as was done after World War II. Despite Bush’s triumphant speech on an aircraft carrier in 2003, Saddam’s supporters have not been defeated. They and others are waging a terror war against Americans and Iraqis that is unlike anything the US faced in World War II. The better analogy is to Vietnam, except that the Iraq conflict is even more savage in its civilians slaug-hter and more unpredict-able in its attacks on US combatants, who face the stresses of uncertainty and a shadowy adversary that their grandfathers did not experience.