Bush Vietnam trip revives Iraq 'quagmire'

[Ron Burgundy]

AP - President Bush's recent acknowledgment that the war in Iraq was comparable to the Viet Cong's psychologically devastating Tet Offensive in 1968 was hardly the first time a parallel has been drawn between the Iraq and Vietnam conflicts.

Questions about a "quagmire" have haunted the president's Iraq policy since before a single bomb fell on Baghdad.

But this week, amid an intensifying discussion at home about the future of the war, Bush gives the comparison debate another kick by walking among Vietnam War relics on a four-day visit to the communist nation created after American troops departed 33 years ago.

The president left the White House on Tuesday night, planning to stop briefly in Moscow and then in Singapore before arriving in Hanoi on Friday for a state visit and a massive summit of Pacific Rim leaders. He also spends a day in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon.

As the summit host, Vietnam is focused on what will be a coming-out party for its ascendant economy, preferring to look ahead rather than back. Bush, too, is emphasizing economic reforms in Vietnam, and its steadily improving cooperation on trade and issues like AIDS and bird flu.

But there will be no mistaking the reminders of the country's wartime past and the U.S. military's troubled history there.

There's Truc Bach lake where then-Lt. Cmdr. John McCain, now a Republican senator from Arizona, was captured after parachuting out of his damaged warplane to spend more than five years as a prisoner of war. It is hard to avoid the statues of Ho Chi Minh, the victorious North's revolutionary communist leader. One of the capital's trendiest nightspots is the disco Apocalypse Now.

Bush's official itinerary includes a tour of the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command, where he will be briefed on efforts to locate or account for all of the nearly 1,800 service members still missing from the Vietnam War theater. On view there are rusted remnants of machine guns unearthed during searches, maps of excavation sites and the destroyed instrument panel of a downed U.S. helicopter.

The Vietnam visit also comes with Bush on the cusp of becoming America's longest-serving wartime president, surpassing Lyndon Johnson's tenure at the helm of the Vietnam War that he escalated and passed on to Richard Nixon.

While the president flew toward Vietnam, only the second president to go there since the war's end, a partisan feud continued in Washington over where to take Iraq policy.

Last week's elections handed Democrats control of Capitol Hill in large part because of Americans' war weariness. Now, without agreement on a single alternative plan, Democrats have made clear they view the election as a mandate for change in Iraq and that they expect a significant voice in the process.

Bush's Tet remark came last month, as October was on track to be one of the deadliest of the war. He said a New York Times columnist who made the comparison to the Viet Cong's deadly communist push into South Vietnam, seen as a turning point in opinion against the war and against Johnson, "could be right."

But aides later said the president was referring mostly to the effect that rising violence has on public opinion, particularly when timed before elections. Bush and his aides have steadfastly argued that any overall comparison to Vietnam is flawed, citing high public support for the troops — if not the war — and a large reservoir of support among soldiers for the mission.

Stephen Hadley, the president's national security adviser, said a key difference is that the stakes are higher with Iraq.

"I remember a debate about what would happen if the United States left Vietnam and there were discussions about dominos, some which fell, some which didn't fall," he said of the view by some that other Southeast Asian states would fall, one by one, to communism if Vietnam was lost.

"But nobody, I think, felt that it would result in a clear and present danger to the territory of the United States," Hadley continued. "And I think one of the things that's different is I think most men and women in America believe that it is important that we not fail in Iraq, that the consequences of an Iraq that descended into chaos would be an Iraq that would be a safe haven for terrorists."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, speaking en route to Hanoi meeting, also rejected comparisons between the two wars.

"Historic parallels of that kind are, I think, not very helpful and I don't think they happen to be right," Rice told reporters. "This is a different set of circumstances with different stakes for the United States in a different kind of war."

Asked about it last week during a news conference, Bush said, "I see differences, I really do. ... I don't think it's a parallel."

Michael O'Hanlon, a foreign-policy scholar at the Brookings Institution who is part of the independent, bipartisan Iraq Study Group, ticked off a steadily growing number of parallels, including an insurgency that has established "a self-sustaining momentum that is very hard to overcome" and a weak allied government.

He also said that another parallel with Vietnam could give reason for hope if U.S. policymakers cannot figure out a winning prescription for the war. Many argued during Vietnam that failure there would be catastrophic for Washington's geopolitical interests, and that turned out not to be the case. Further, O'Hanlon said, Vietnam 30 years later is becoming an American partner.

"Bush is right to try to win," he said. "But we thought the sky would fall in the '70s too, and it didn't. ... The United States has enough strategic assets to survive such things."

Thomas Donnelly, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Iraq is similar in that it "has confounded us."

But the main difference he cited between the two wars followed the administration line. Citing Iraq's location in the volatile Middle East, the importance of its oil reserves and fears that the Sunni-Shiite battle dividing Iraq could spread throughout the region, he said the United States cannot afford to lose in — or even withdraw from — Iraq.

"We can't walk away from the Persian Gulf in the same way that we could in Southeast Asia," Donnelly said. "If we leave, it is clear that others will intervene."