History repeats: Fallujah signals the beginning of the new Vietnam

Indeed, the more “Fallujahs” there are, with the inevitable "collateral" damage and deaths, the more hated the occupying power is likely to become. And here we see the strategy of the insurgents: The age-old device of forcing their opponents to ever-greater levels of effort and violence, feeding resentment and hatred of the occupiers. At the same time, the apparently endless nature of the war, its dollar and casualty costs, work to undermine the will of the occupiers to continue.

President Bush's victory in the recent elections shows that this point has yet to be reached: the US will to continue is still strong. But depending on how one counts, it took the Vietnamese between five and ten years to break America's will to fight: In 1964 President Johnson won a smashing electoral victory; by 1968 he had been forced to stand aside for another candidate.

It therefore looks as though the Iraqi war could be a long agony for the Americans, their allies and, above all, for the Iraqi people. If it is still continuing in 2008, what price the conservatives in Washington then?

It is perhaps appropriate to conclude with one more famous quotation, this from George Santayana, a late nineteenth and early twentieth century philosopher:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Memo George W Bush.