Last night NPR interviewed Joseph Nye, Dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who commented on President Bush’s VFW speech yesterday — and, specifically, on the president’s invocation of Vietnam. According to Professor Nye:

This mess [Iraq] is sui generis. But I guess the closest would be Vietnam in the sense that we’ve gotten ourselves into a war against the nationalistically mobilized population, which were not in the process of winning. And the difference with all analogies break down is that after we got out of Vietnam, the people who took over were the North Vietnamese. And that was a government which preserved order. And the problem in Iraq is who’s going to preserve order after we get out? So like all analogies, it’s imperfect. But I guess that would be the closest.

Two thoughts. The first is that to describe the conflict in Iraq as a “war against the nationalistically mobilized population” is misleading and simplistic. Professor Nye fails to mention al Qaeda in Iraq, which consists largely of foreign terrorists who are responsible for many of the most spectacular suicide bombings, as well as the role of Iran and Syria. The most important facts on the ground this year is that the population in Iraq is turning against al Qaeda in Iraq and siding with the American military. But Professor Nye seems not to care.

Beyond that, Professor Nye has a charming way to describe North Vietnam, as a government which “preserved order” — almost as if Russell Kirk was the head of its government. The order Professor Nye refers to is the order of the gulag, concentration camps and torture chambers, and the secret police. It might be worthwhile for Joe Nye to place a call to John McCain, formerly a resident of the” Hanoi Hilton,” to find out just what kind of order the North Vietnamese imposed.