Iraq unfolds in ways few thought possible; a stalemate in less than two years that in Vietnam took 12; each held to a single-minded righteousness in their clash of fundamentalisms but framed in a battle for self-respect against a cynical invader.

In Vietnam, the backdrop was the Cold War, a proxy war between the free world and communism; in Iraq, of Islam and Christianity; in both, each sure of his singular righteousness. It does not stop here. Both wars began on false premises, and brought to a stalemate with only one credible aim: how Washington could extricate from the mess with a semblance of honour.

Washington dismissed the fundamentalists - communism or Islam - as beyond the pale, belittling the nationalism that bound them, invaded their countries with no understanding of the ground, and forced into a stalemate in which its force lost its will as the native regained his.

The bloody aerial bombing firmed native resolve against the invader. The first use of it as an apparatus of colonial control was in 1911 when the Italians attacked an isolated oasis outside Tripoli and since, an important tactic in the colonial armoury: Kenya, India, Burma, Indonesia, Malaya, the Philippines, Palestine, Vietnam, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Algeria, Indochina. In each, the colonial task became the more hazardous and fruitless and, in the end, lost.

In Vietnam, it look a decade for the war to end in stalemate; in Iraq, two years. Washington conducts the war in Iraq with the failed strategy and tactics in Vietnam: to bomb it into submission. It proudly proclaim more bombs dropped in Iraq than Vietnam and World War II, with the threat of more if there is no surrender, but without understanding why this would not work.

I noticed this in my years in Vietnam as a reporter in the 1960s and 1970s. One learns to live with the bombing, frightened and in mortal fear as one is, but with the population, a resolve to confront and expel the invaders in time becomes a nationalist end. The invaders believe, as in Iraq, that the natives are there as cannon fodder.