From the President's recent farce of a press conference:

QUESTION: ...Mr. President, April is turning into the deadliest month in Iraq since the fall of Baghdad, and some people are comparing Iraq to Vietnam and talking about a quagmire. Polls show that support for your policy is declining and that fewer than half of Americans now support it.

What does that say to you? And how do you answer the Vietnam comparison?

BUSH: I think the analogy is false. I also happen to think that analogy sends the wrong message to our troops and sends the wrong message to the enemy.

Look, this is hard work. It's hard to advance freedom in a country that has been strangled by tyranny. And yet we must stay the course because the end result is in our nation's interest.

"Staying the course" didn't work for Johnson or Nixon, so the Vietnam analogy seems apt.

Oh, but we're insulting the troops. Okay, Mr. President. Perhaps you can have Condi brief you on two pieces of history that are, perhaps, less insulting:

France in Algiers. The gist:

An urban war of attrition was raging in Algiers, especially after the French defeated the National Liberation Front on the open battlefield in 1958. There were occasional terrorist attacks, following by interim periods of exhaustion, and there was a sense that everything was pointless. In Vietnam, there was an external withdrawal region and a regular army, which was being supplied with modern weapons, not just from the north, but also from the Soviet Union and China. There was a prolonged guerilla war with many victims.

Honestly, I don't know much about the conflict in Algiers, though by reading that paragraph in an article forwarded to me by Stigmutha, I know more about it than the Prez. Here's a wiki.

Oh, but maybe that's a poor choice. After all, as far as the neocons are concerned, the French are just champagne-sipping, cigarette-smoking, surrendering faggots. Fine. How's about this one:

Britain in Iraq after WWI. To wit:

What happened in Iraq last week so closely resembles the events of 1920 that only a historical ignoramus could be surprised. It began in May, just after the announcement that Iraq would henceforth be a League of Nations "mandate" under British trusteeship. (Nota bene, if you think a handover to the UN would solve everything.) Anti-British demonstrations began in Baghdad mosques, spread to the Shi'ite holy centre of Karbala, swept on through Rumaytha and Samawa - where British forces were besieged - and reached as far as Kirkuk.

Contrary to British expectations, Sunnis, Shi'ites and even Kurds acted together. Stories abounded of mutilated British bodies. By August the situation was so desperate that the British commander appealed to London for poison gas bombs or shells (though these turned out not to be available). By the time order had been restored in December - with a combination of aerial bombardment and punitive village-burning expeditions - British forces had sustained over 2,000 casualties and the financial cost of the operation was being denounced in Parliament. In the aftermath of the revolt, the British were forced to accelerate the transfer of power to a nominally independent Iraqi government, albeit one modelled on their own form of constitutional monarchy.

There's more examples than this, surely. Imperialism nearly always takes the form of "we're going to improve your lives." The Romans built roads and aqueducts. They also destroyed ways of life. Give an inch, take a mile.

Note that the Romans were overrun by Mongols, a decentralized but highly efficient army. Think about it. We should learn from the Romans mistakes before our "crusade" on Iraq pushes stability further out of reach.

The Bush administration is Bizarro Quinn jumping up and down screaming, "I'm helping! I'm helping! I'm helping!" (What, you don't watch Sealab 2021?)