Our Best and Brightest

In the current Times, Bob Herbert quotes John McCain :

"It was a shameful thing to ask men to suffer and die, to persevere through god-awful afflictions and heartache, to endure the dehumanizing experiences that are unavoidable in combat, for a cause that the country wouldn't support over time and that our leaders so wrongly believed could be achieved at a smaller cost than our enemy was prepared to make us pay."

Today's quiz question is: which war is McCain speaking of ? Iraq or Vietnam ?
Well, this quote is part of a new intro to David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, so of course McCain means Vietnam. Just the same, doesn't this fit our current situation rather well ?