Syria as Cambodia - Someone's pushing this.

On Saturday, I put up a post on a clip from the NYTimes talking about border clashes between US forces in Iraq and Some unspecified Syrian forces. But I want to focus on a particular passage.

Increasingly, officials say, Syria is to the Iraq war what Cambodia was in the Vietnam War: a sanctuary for fighters, money and supplies to flow over the border and, ultimately, a place for a shadow struggle.

That's what jumped out at me, and made me blog it. But what's curious, is that today, I came across this link at Trying to Maintain Rationality. From an opinion piece from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The parallel with the Vietnam War, where a Nixon administration deeply involved in a losing war expanded the conflict -- fruitlessly in the event -- to neighboring Cambodia, is obvious. The end result was not changed in Vietnam; Cambodia itself was plunged into dangerous chaos, which climaxed in the killing fields, where an estimated 1 million Cambodians died as a result of internal conflict.

Now, I don't know Dan Simpson, the writer of this edop, and I don't know if he lifted this idea from that NYTimes piece, but I find this recurrence of the Syria as Cambodia parallel troubling for a number of reasons.

1) The US left Cambodia a broken state when we abandoned it after withdrawal.

2) This would mark a substantial escalation in the region with our militsry already overstretched.

3) This is particularly troubling when viewed against Bush's recent remarks that the US withdrawal from Vietnam was a mistake and that we should have stayed there.(I'll try to find a supporting link for this, this afternoon.)

Is this the rational the Bush admin is going to use to invade Syria?

Has anyone else run across this occurence of Syria as Cambodia? Is this a trial balloon or a fluke? Is this parallel being pushed by someone? And if so, who? And Why?

Help me out.

UPDATE: Sort of related. The UN report on the killing of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri concluded that it involved high ranking officials of both Syria and Lebanon. Not really a surprise, but significant in the geopolitics of it.