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The Iraq war is lost. The best we can hope for is years more of bloody resistance to a brutal occupation, with each day churning out more and more corpses. More gruesome injuries. More ruined lives. And for what?

The closest thing to a plan the president has offered for getting us out of the killing fields is a simplistic fantasy — As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.

Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah:

America was a superpower, and it was inconceivable that it could lose a war to a third-rate nation...So the White House conceived an elaborate strategy that would mask the fact of an American defeat. The US would slowly withdraw its combat troops over a period of several years, while the mission of those who remained would change from fighting the North Vietnamese and Vietcong to training the South Vietnamese to carry on the fight on their own. At the same time, we would give the South Vietnamese a series of performance ultimatums which, if unmet, would trigger a total withdrawal and let us blame the South Vietnamese for the debacle that would follow. This strategy was called "Vietnamization." Implementing it cost at least 10,000 additional American and countless more Vietnamese lives, plus billions of dollars.

Ten thousand American soldiers died to mask what virtually everyone knew to be a cynical "public relations campaign," one that placed a higher value on a president's reputation and pride than on human lives. Along with the bombing of civilians in Hanoi, the manufactured events in the Gulf of Tonkin, Agent Orange, My Lai, and all the other lies and atrocities of that war, the sham of Vietnamization ranks among the worst of it.

And now, incredibly, it's happening again.