November 17, 2006
Diplomatic Memo
On to Vietnam, Bush Hears Echoes of 1968 in Iraq 2006
By DAVID E. SANGER

ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE, Friday, Nov. 17 — During the presidential campaign in 2000, George W. Bush, who served out the Vietnam War in the Texas Air National Guard, was asked whether he ever considered volunteering to fight when he graduated from Yale in 1968.

“Did I think about going to the Army post and saying ‘Send me to Vietnam?’ ” Mr. Bush asked, describing his own outlook in 1968. “Not really. I wanted to fly, and that was the adventure I was seeking.”

Thirty-eight years later, at age 60, Mr. Bush is finally arriving in Vietnam. On Friday he starts a 72-hour visit, linked to an annual Asian summit meeting that the Communist government in Vietnam is playing host to for the first time and that some White House officials concede is spectacularly poorly timed. Just as Lyndon B. Johnson did in 1968, Mr. Bush has ousted his longtime defense secretary and nominated a realist with “fresh eyes” to replace him. Just like President Johnson in 1968, he is conducting a broad rethinking of strategy, and is hearing options he does not like.

The White House insists that the comparisons stop there. His aides argue that the analogies between these two wars, conducted in different parts of the world, facing very different enemies, are mostly false ones.

The comparisons will nonetheless be the unavoidable subtext of Mr. Bush’s every move as he travels in Hanoi and then stops in the city that in his youth was known as Saigon, and that became the scene of an American military debacle. And he will have to convince his allies, ordinary Americans, and perhaps himself, that Iraq will end differently.

Until now, when asked what he had learned from Vietnam, Mr. Bush has almost reflexively reached for the same line: That he does not micromanage his generals, the way Mr. Johnson did. It is a response drawn from conservative orthodoxy about what went wrong in Vietnam, underlying an argument that had the generals been allowed to fight their way, the United States might have won.

But he may feel compelled to say more after he lands in Hanoi. Mr. Bush will find himself inside government halls adorned with paintings of Ho Chi Minh. He will be talking about the future of Asia with Ho’s Communist successors who, Washington once warned, could not be allowed to win under any circumstances.

He will be sleeping just a mile or so from the open-air equivalent to the Situation Room where Ho Chi Minh managed his generals, from a single telephone at the end of a conference table. (It is now part of a museum, but Mr. Bush’s schedule reveals no plans to visit.) His motorcade will zip past the lake where John McCain was pulled to shore after bailing out, and Mr. Bush will have his picture taken with foreign leaders under the same skies where Operation Rolling Thunder, the bombing attack on North Vietnam’s capital, tried to break the enemy’s will.

With such emotional imagery to deal with, it is no surprise that Mr. Bush’s national security team has spent an enormous amount of time drawing distinctions between the war that their generation grew up with, and the one that they ordered.

“Historical parallels of that kind are not very helpful, and I don’t think they happen to be right,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters the other day, in a tone she might have used for a Stanford graduate student whose thesis was not holding together. “This is a different set of circumstances, with different stakes for the United States.”

Stephen J. Hadley, the president’s national security adviser, struck a similar note last week when he suggested that the “domino effect” that Americans worried about in the 1960s and 70s — the fear that neighboring countries would fall to Communism’s lures — was nothing compared with the problems today.

“There were discussions about dominoes, some which fell, some which didn’t fall,” he said, recalling the Vietnam debate that raged when he was a student at Cornell. But, he added, “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.”

Ultimately, he said, that “could result in 9/11-type attacks against the United States,” a reach across the ocean that no one really harbored three decades ago.

In private, Mr. Bush says there is another big difference between then and now — the draft. There is little question that by signing up to be a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard, the risk was low that he would end up in Vietnam as a 23-year-old. But according to an academic called into the White House recently, Mr. Bush said, “We could never have sustained this effort in Iraq, politically,” if there was not an all-volunteer force. He declined to be named because he was relaying a private conversation.

The argument that Vietnam is very different gets some backing from Stanley Karnow, the Vietnam historian. “There are differences and similarities, of course,” he said. “We got lied into both wars.”

But, he added, “The easy summation is that Vietnam began as a guerrilla war and escalated into an orthodox war — by the end we were fighting in big units. Iraq starts as a conventional war, and has degenerated into a guerrilla war. It has gone in an opposite direction. And it’s much more difficult to deal with.”

U.S. Seeks Korea Nuclear Step

HANOI, Nov. 16—The United States is working with China and other Asian nations to pressure North Korea to take a visible step toward dismantling its nuclear program before starting a new round of nuclear disarmament talks, American officials said Thursday.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that while she was hopeful that the talks — begun in 2003 — would restart in December, it was pointless to return to the bargaining table without a show of good faith from both sides. Speaking to reporters in Hanoi after meeting with some of her counterparts for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting, Ms. Rice refused to expand on what those steps would be. But American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said an acceptable move might be for North Korea to dismantle one of its nuclear facilities and readmit inspectors.