Comparisons with Vietnam shadow Bush trip

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HANOI -- President Bush will focus on trade and worldwide crises like AIDS and bird flu during his eight-day trip to Southeast Asia, but the specter of the Vietnam War 30 years ago and comparisons to the U.S.-led war in Iraq have followed him to the Pacific Rim.

The president has repeatedly rejected comparisons between the two wars, even as Democratic critics complain that Iraq has become a "quagmire" like Vietnam, which U.S. forces abandoned in 1973 after the deaths of 58,000 American troops.

"I see differences, I really do," Mr. Bush insisted last week in a press conference. "I don't think it is a parallel."

Other top administration officials also say there is no likeness between the two conflicts.

"This was a different set of circumstances with different stakes for the United States and a different kind of war," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said this week in Germany. And National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley said before the president departed this week on his trip that the two wars are different.

"I remember a debate about what would happen if the United States left Vietnam, and there were discussions about dominoes, some which fell, some of which didn't fall," he said. "But nobody, I think, felt that it would result in a clear and present danger to the territory of the United States."

Still, Democrats charge that the Bush administration has not learned the lessons from the Vietnam War, and some party leaders have directly compared the two wars. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, has called the Iraq war a "seemingly intractable quagmire ... with no end in sight," and others complain that there has never been an exit strategy -- a lesson that should have been learned from Vietnam.

There are, in some ways, comparisons worth noting. In nearly every speech he gives, the president insists that the war in Iraq is the central front in the war against terror and has warned that if the United States fails there, other nations in the Middle East could fall like dominoes.

"The enemy understands the stakes of what a free society will mean to their ambitions to spread their dark vision throughout the Middle East and then the world," he said during a campaign event before the Nov. 7 elections.

The construction mirrors the premise that led the United States into Vietnam in the 1960s: that Southeast nations near Vietnam would fall into communist hands if the United States failed in its effort to help South Vietnam fight the North.

Critics say, however, that the "domino theory" proved false.

"We thought the sky would fall in the '70s, too, and it didn't," said Michael O'Hanlon, a foreign-policy scholar at the Brookings Institution who is part of the independent, bipartisan Iraq Study Group. He also said there are several other parallels between the two wars, including an insurgency that has established "a self-sustaining momentum that is very hard to overcome" and a weak allied government.

Vietnam scholar Robert K. Brigham, a Vassar College history professor, asserts that the parallels between the two wars are unmistakable. In both wars, superior U.S. firepower did not translate into victory, nation-building became ever more difficult with the passage of time, and public support waned after years of war.

"In going to war in Iraq, the George W. Bush administration has purposefully turned its back on the lessons of Vietnam," Mr. Brigham writes in his new book, "Is Iraq Another Vietnam?" "That the United States is not omnipotent is an important lesson Americans learned in the mangrove swamps and highlands of Vietnam. It is one the United States is (re)learning in Iraq as well."

But Pham Viet. Anh does not agree that the Iraq war is like the Vietnam War.

"I think it is different. The Vietnam War was between South Vietnam and North Vietnam, not a war between Vietnam and the United States," the 24-year-old magazine reporter said outside Hanoi's grand Temple of Literature.

But the reminders are everywhere. Near the center of the city is Truc Bach lake, where then-Lt. Cmdr. John McCain, now a Republican senator from Arizona and a likely presidential candidate in 2008, was captured after parachuting out of his damaged warplane to spend more than five years as a prisoner of war. Statues of Ho Chi Minh, the victorious North's revolutionary communist leader, are everywhere, and thousands flock to his mausoleum each year to see his body. One of the capital's trendiest nightspots is the disco Apocalypse Now, named after one of the most famous movies made about the war.

The president will add to the reminders this weekend when he tours 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.

• This article was based in part on wire service reports.