With Regard to William E. Odom's 'Iraq Through the Prism of Vietnam'

William E. Odom's 'Iraq Through the Prism of Vietnam' (found on Talking Points Memo, by Josh Marshall) offers close comparisons between the war in Iraq and the Vietnam War. Odom divides both wars into three phases, after which he attempts to draw similarities and comparisons between the events of the Vietnam War in a certain phase and the events surrounding the war in Iraq in the corresponding phase. Although his essay describes three parts to the Vietnam War, he states that the war in Iraq is still immersed in the second part, but Odom does go on, after firmly comparing stage one and what could be compared using stage two, to extrapolate the future events that will occur involving the Iraq conflict, corresponding these predicted events to the events that occured in the stages of the final part of Odom's intrepretation of the Vietnam War.
Considering Odom's credentials (retired lieutenant of the U.S. Army, professor at Yale University, Senior Fellow with the Hudson Institute, Director of the National Security Agency from 1985-1988, Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence from 1981-1985, and Military Assistant to the President's Assistant for National Security Affairs from 1977-1981), he would seem to have enough military and political experience and expertise to analyze this situation with a certain amount of pragmatic thought that would lead to a logically sound conclusion. His points, argued with a sense of prudence, certainly show a correlation between the events of Vietnam War and of the war in Iraq, steeling the ambient dictum that history repeats itself. Odom shows that, in points one and two, the political and militaristic interests and interpretations are very similar between the two wars, and in point three Odom parallelizes the actual results of the Vietnam War to that which he proposes as a theory as to what shall occur as the war in Iraq as it approaches the final stage. Thus, due to the well-developed and logically ordered set of arguments given for the parallelism between the two wars, Odom does profound job of expressing and substantiating his beliefs.