I see that President Bush is visiting Vietnam. Vietnam, while still under an authoritarian communist dictatorship, has made great strides, economically speaking. The country has been at peace now for almost thirty years — since its short border war with the Chinese and its invasion of Cambodia to expel the Khmer rouge government, both back in the late seventies — and one may suppose that the local citizenry, whatever gripes they may have (and, being human, I'm pretty sure that they have a lot of them), can at least get up in the morning fairly confident that they will still be around come evening. Heck, next year's Internacia Junulara Kongreso (International Youth [Esperanto] Congress) is going to be held in Hanoi.
President Bush takes the opportunity to remind us of the lesson to be learned from the Vietnam War: "We'll succeed unless we quit."
This raises two basic questions: what is Bush's definition of "success" and what sort of grades did he get in his history classes at Yale? (Or: did he even study history at Yale?)
If our purpose in Vietnam was to leave behind us a relatively peaceful country, economically successful, then I would argue that we succeeded only when we quit. Of course, if we wanted a country reduced to chaos, with hundreds of thousands dying every year from war, then quitting did indeed cost us our chance of success — as it no doubt will in Iraq.