Bush’s Vietnam-Iraq analysis is flawed

THE ISSUE The president has evoked images of Vietnam to argue for continuing the Iraq war.

IN arguing for staying the course in Iraq, President Bush was factually correct in recounting the human toll that followed America's withdrawal from Vietnam. However, the president glossed over the differing circumstances of the wars while failing to acknowledge that much of the horror he described in Vietnam's aftermath is already taking place in Iraq.

Bush's speech to a VFW convention marked another front in the administration's battle to regain dwindling support for the war among congressional Republicans while putting Democrats on the defensive by evoking images of the last flight out of Saigon. The speech, coupled with a new $15 million public relations offensive mounted by administration allies, illustrates the president's resolve to keep U.S. troops in Iraq.

In his comparison, Bush neglected germane lessons the administration should consider, chief among them the futility of occupying a country with a collapsing, ineffectual government engaged in a civil war.

Tying Iraq to Vietnam, the president recalled the "killing fields" of Cambodia and the "boat people" who fled their homeland. He cannot be unaware of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens who have been killed or of the millions who have escaped to Syria, Iran and elsewhere.

He ignores pertinent parallels between the genocidal Khmer Rouge whose rise to power was fueled by the American presence in Southeast Asia and the terrorist and insurgent groups seeded by the Iraqi invasion.

Public opinion against the war has solidified, but Bush hopes to persuade Congress to give the war more time. His success depends on whether he can twist perspectives, a skill the administration has largely mastered.