When analogies attack!

So Bush compares Iraq to Vietnam, saying that America should stay until the war is won. The Vietnamese response?

"Doesn't he realize that if the U.S. had stayed in Vietnam longer, they would have killed more people?" said Vu Huy Trieu of Hanoi, a veteran of the communist forces that fought American troops in Vietnam. "Nobody regrets that the Vietnam War wasn't prolonged except Bush."

Meanwhile, Bush also compared Iraq to the occupation of Japan, saying:

“An interesting observation, one historian put it, ‘Had these erstwhile experts’ — he was talking about people criticizing the efforts to help Japan realize the blessings of a free society — he said, ‘Had these erstwhile experts had their way, the very notion of inducing a democratic revolution would have died of ridicule at an early stage.’

The response by the historian in question?

“They [war supporters] keep on doing this,” said MIT professor John Dower. “They keep on hitting it and hitting it and hitting it and it’s always more and more implausible, strange and in a fantasy world. They’re desperately groping for a historical analogy, and their uses of history are really perverse.”

Read that link in particular -- Dower has a long record of opposing the war in Iraq specifically because it bears no relation to the successful occupation of Japan. But hey, when you start using Alden Pyle as a referent to support your war, you've pretty much lost any grip on appropriate comparisons...