Is the Middle East Obama's Viet Nam?

When people call the Middle East debacle Obama's Viet Nam, they are not wrong.

[W]hen the United States withdrew from Vietnam in January 1973, when “peace” was finally achieved, it came at a horrendous cost. Cambodia was dragged directly into the fray, leading ultimately to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and a genocide that killed approximately 1.7 million people— 20.1 percent of Cambodia’s population.

  Salon

Hold on a minute. I'm old enough to remember that Cambodia was "dragged into the fray" well before "peace" was achieved in Viet Nam. I remember when it was finally reported in American media that we were bombing in Cambodia, and it was a political scandal for Nixon (albeit not the one that did him in).

In 1971, a returning veteran named John Kerry testified powerfully before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He indicted the war as “the biggest nothing in history” and posed a powerful question: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

Kissinger’s best answer to Kerry’s question was “for the sake of credibility.”

[...]

However fashionable it is to ridicule the terms “credibility” or “prestige,” they are not empty phrases; other nations can gear their actions to ours only if they can count on our steadiness . . . In many parts of the world—the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, even Japan— stability depends on confidence in American promises.   [Henry Kissinger]

Henry Kissinger’s plan for a staged withdrawal from Vietnam was thus sustained by the logic of keeping up appearances. “We could not simply walk away from an enterprise involving two administrations, five allied countries, and thirty-one thousand dead,” Kissinger observed in his memoir.

[...]

In Paris in March 1969, President Charles de Gaulle asked Kissinger, “Why don’t you get out of Vietnam?” Surprised by de Gaulle’s bluntness, Kissinger answered, “Because a sudden withdrawal might give us a credibility problem.”

Something we've NEVER had, and we don't intend to create one now.

As the ground war was being deescalated, the U.S. bombing campaign increased sharply in intensity—and secretly, for such actions were always likely to create a firestorm of protest.

Well, THAT's not a problem these days.

Like Obama, Nixon made a campaign promise to end the war in Viet Nam (but escalated it instead), and announced that American troops would be drawn down and the Vietnamese would be trained up to take over their own governance. And none of that went well, either.

Unfortunately, unlike Nixon, Obama has not been forced to withdraw. And he's extended air strikes to drag seven nations "into the fray."

Also unlike Nixon, Obama has not had constant TV coverage of his bombing campaigns. Journalists were a different breed back then.  But we're still pretending the US has some credibility.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.