Not Vietnam

Tom Regan thinks it looks more like Algeria.

He has a point. No analogy is perfect; the hawks who liken Iraq to Germany are, in my opinion, at least as far wrong as the doves who think rice paddies have been replaced by the desert floor. Algeria, however, is the historic model for anti-Western insurgency in the Middle East. (I would rather not hear any wisecracks about the quiche-eating French here; the colonial forces in Algeria were as brutal as any that America would ever be willing to field.)