Iran is "Trump's Vietnam" -- and it's going to get a lot worse

[marmar]

Iran is “Trump’s Vietnam” — and it’s going to get a lot worse
We’ve barely begun to feel the economic effects of Trump’s misbegotten war. This fall could get rough

By Heather Digby Parton
Columnist
Published June 7, 2026 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) Leon Panetta has been in politics as long as any of us can remember. He started out as a Republican, working in the office of Sen. Thomas Kuchel, R-Calif., in the late 1960s. (Kuchel belonged to the now-vanished species of moderate Republican and actually supported both the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.) He moved up quickly to become director of the Office of Civil Rights under Richard Nixon.

....(snip)....

Panetta has always been a centrist, and I’ve been critical of his “maverick” track record over the years — he’s had a tendency to burnish his own reputation to the detriment of those he works for. But at age 87, from his perch as the head of the Panetta Institute for Public Policy, it’s hard to imagine he now thinks he has anything left to prove. So when Panetta appeared on CNN to talk about the Iran war, a subject he is well qualified to discuss, and says that it’s shaping up to be “Trump’s Vietnam,” you can’t help but be a bit startled. If anyone still in public life knows how much freight that phrase carries, it would be him.

That comparison might sound hyperbolic since Vietnam was a 20-year meat-grinder of a war that cost the lives of more than 50,000 Americans and something like 3.5 million Vietnamese, both troops and civilians. But Panetta drew the comparison based on the argument that Donald Trump‘s war was an equally terrible miscalculation of the adversary’s resilience and commitment, where we’re dealing with misinformation and propaganda coming from the U.S. administration and an untrustworthy negotiating partner on the other side.

In other words, Americans have once again overestimated their own prowess and underestimated their enemy; our own government is constantly lying about the war, and the Iranians are unlikely to stick to any deal without solid verification, which is going to be difficult to manage at best. To state the obvious, the U.S. under Trump is equally untrustworthy, having torn up the hard-fought nuclear agreement negotiated under Obama, which by all accounts the Iranians had been honoring. .........................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/06/07/iran-is-trumps-vietnam-and-its-going-to-get-a-lot-worse/

[EYESORE 9001]

1. If I were to attempt drawing a parallel between Vietnam and Iran

I would point to windfalls for the MIC in both conflicts.

[bucolic_frolic]

2. Correct because the underlying basis for both wars is economic, and the people

we're trying to subdue and steal from don't want to go along.

But on the plus side, 60 years out, we do buy a lot of goods that we manufacture: Made in Vietnam.

Blood for resources.

[eppur_se_muova]

3. Civilian casualties greatly outnumber military so far, so yeah, there's a parallel.

Throwing massive amounts of explosives at poorly specified targets from a distance tends to so that.

WWI introduced the "morality of altitude", missles and drones give us the "morality of distance". Massive civilian casualties are out of sight, out of mind.