It is of no help to the war effort in Iraq, or to the morale of our troops, for Sen. Chuck Hagel to be running around comparing Iraq with Vietnam, which is a fantasy of the first order that ignores the political and military dynamics that existed during the Vietnam war. To be uttering such a ludicrous statement is all the more surprising, given that Hagel served in Vietnam.

Someone should tell Sen. Hagel to go read this:

American generals and policymakers could never agree as to whether the guerrillas in Vietnam were self-supporting or were sustained from the outside (namely the northern half of their own country). However one may now view that debate, it was certainly true that Hanoi, and the southern rebels, were regularly resupplied not by minor regional potentates but by serious superpowers such as the Warsaw Pact and China, and were able to challenge American forces in battlefield order. The Iraqi "insurgents" are based among a minority of a minority, and are localized geographically, and have no steady source of external supply. Here the better comparison would be with the dogmatic Communists in Malaya in the 1940s, organized principally among the Chinese minority and eventually defeated even by an exhausted postwar British empire. But even the die-hard Malayan Stalinists had a concept of "people's war" and a brave record in fighting Japanese imperialism. The Iraqi "insurgents" are dismal riff-raff by comparison.

Sen. George Allen, not surprisingly and to his great credit, emphatically disputed Hagel's characterization:

"There was a government, so to speak. It was North Vietnam," he said. "Here the terrorists don't have any government. They are just there to wreak havoc, to intimidate."

Mr. Allen also said the recent reports of militias with local ties forming in Iraq are not so troubling.

"Just think of how this country started; they were all state militias. And so they were loyal to the communities, their homes, their counties, or in some cases their states," he said. "That's not unusual."

Why Sen. Hagel insists on running around with a bullhorn, proclaiming to anyone who will listen that we are "losing" a war that has morphed into a Vietnam-like situation is beyond me, when such an assertion has very little basis in fact. Yes, we are going through a particularly difficult time in Iraq at present. This is not a surprise, given that Al Qaeda is gravely afraid of the construction of a democratic Iraqi constitution, and will attempt to cause maximum death and destruction to intimidate those involved with that construction.

Mr. Hagel's Iraq-Vietnam comparison serves no useful purpose, and has significant potential to demoralize American military personnel, when they hear a prominent American politician declare that the war in which they are fighting is akin to America's Vietnam experience. Sen. Hagel would be well advised to employ more discretion before he makes such comments in the future.