By Pepe Escobar

Just as it took a few years for the Americans to lose the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese, it took them only a few weeks to lose the hearts and minds of the majority of Iraqis – which ultimately means losing the war, whatever the strategic final result. Topographic denials – this is the Mesopotamian desert, not the Indochinese jungle – don‘t work, nor do denials saying that the Iraqis are not as politicized as the Vietnamese were by communism. These totally miss the point: as happened in Vietnam, what is happening now in Iraq has everything to do with patriotism and nationalism.