Humiliating defeat that haunts US in new quagmire

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Thirty-one years after the US army left Saigon, President Bush flies in for a visit dogged by the unlearned lessons of history

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In reality, the most compelling parallel has little to do with either Iraq or Vietnam. It is about the nature of power: America's view of itself in the world, and its execution of foreign policy.

Once again, America is sending troops to a faraway country that it does not understand, an incomprehension that has led to fatally flawed war plans and policies. Once again, it has committed forces for reasons that seem unclear at best. In Vietnam, it was the August 1964 attack on US destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin, which we now know never happened. In Iraq, it was the imminent danger that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. And that is why this war has proven so painful - because the lessons of Vietnam were not absorbed.

This is Mr Bush's first overseas trip since the midterm elections, when American anger at the war in Iraq cost the Republicans control of Congress. In the days since then, Mr Bush has worked hard to persuade Americans that he is willing and able to abandon his administration's discredited policies. Mr Rumsfeld - our era's version of Robert McNamara, the Pentagon chief in the 1960s - was sacked. Administration officials argue that Iraq can be fixed. But even if Mr Bush can effect a genuine change of course in the Iraq war, can all the damage of the last three years really be undone? Where will Iraq be 30 years from now, and how will this generation of Americans view this war?

In Vietnam, the visit of a serving US president was intended to show off the country's rising prosperity - not remind the world of earlier suffering. But in a city where Ho Chi Minh's marble mausoleum remains a place of pilgrimage, Mr Bush's weekend in Hanoi may have less to do with the mundane details of trade agreements than awkward reminders of wars present and past.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/frontpage/story/0,,1950299,00.html