You know a president is floundering when the only straw he can grab to support an unpopular war harkens back to an even more unpopular one.

		Sally Kalson is a columnist for the Post-Gazette (skalson@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1610).

That is what President Bush did this week, and it was a sorry sight.

Speaking on Wednesday to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City, Mo., Mr. Bush said that the United States pullout from Vietnam created the bloodbath that followed, and that if we leave Iraq the same thing will happen.

This misreading of the lessons of the Vietnam War goes a long way toward explaining how we got to where we are now.

Mr. Bush was right about this much: The U.S. did bear some responsibility for the killing fields of Cambodia -- but not because we withdrew from the region. Rather, our destabilization of Southeast Asia created the conditions that brought the Khmer Rouge to power.

A similar thing has happened in Iraq, except that where Vietnam had two sides, Iraq has so many we can barely keep track. U.S. involvement there has unleashed a hydra-headed insurgency of warring factions we can't even understand, let alone control, and whose one commonality is hatred of us.

What Mr. Bush didn't say in his speech, and what must be asked, is: What outcome does he imagine would have resulted from an even more prolonged U.S. presence in Indochina (maybe we'd still be there?) and is it any more reality-based than his idea of "winning" in Iraq?

The U.S. was in Vietnam from 1959 to 1975, held captive by South Vietnamese politicians' corruption, ineptitude, internecine feuds and inability to rally their own people to their cause. In all those years, the changing U.S. definition of victory -- first it was defeating the Communists, then it was "Vietnamization" -- never came close to fruition. The cost to this country was 58,000 dead servicemen and women, thousands more wounded, billions of dollars and a loss of credibility on the world stage. To this day, it's not clear how our presence there served our interests.

And yet, here we are again. Our military officers and diplomats are continually frustrated by the inability of the Iraqi politicians to see beyond their own factions. The justification for the war keeps changing -- deposing a despot with weapons of mass destruction that were never found, liberating the Iraqi people, fighting terrorists there so we won't have to fight them here, and now, avoiding a bloodbath.

But the bloodbath is already under way, and its victims include American troops and thousands of Iraqi civilians. Meanwhile, the vision of what "victory" would look like remains elusive, and there's no end in sight.

At least a few people did learn something from Vietnam. One was Mr. Bush's father, who assembled a coalition to drive Saddam Hussein out of the oil fields of Kuwait. The goals of the Gulf War were tightly limited and well defined. Once they were achieved, the soldiers left.

Here is Dick Cheney, of all people, secretary of defense under Bush I, speaking in a 1994 TV interview about the decision not to go into Baghdad (the clip is available online at www.moveon.org):

"If we'd gone to Baghdad we would've been all alone, there wouldn't have been anyone else with us, it would've been a U.S. occupation of Iraq. None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.

"Once you ... took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place? That's a very volatile part of the world and if you take down the central government of Iraq you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. ... It's a quagmire if you go that far. ...

"The other thing is casualties. Everyone was impressed that we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had. But for the 146 Americans killed in action and for their families it wasn't a cheap war. The question for the president in terms of whether we went on to Baghdad ... was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth? In our judgment, it was not very many and I think we got it right."

Fast forward to 9/11 and a more ideological administration, driven by neocons determined to "finish the job" of the first Gulf war. Messrs. Cheney and Bush have done all in their power to confuse the issue of who actually attacked this nation (for those who've forgotten, it was al-Qaida, not Saddam Hussein). Hell-bent on making Iraq the linchpin of the U.S. war on terror, they have transformed that country into a breeding ground for anti-American passions that it wasn't when we invaded.

Mr. Bush's invocation of Vietnam to justify staying in Iraq betrays the desperation of a wounded president. Unable to articulate a credible reason for the war, he is opening old wounds that he knows will rouse his political base. And now his supporters are spending millions on pro-war TV ads that deliberately, and falsely, conflate 9/11 and Iraq.

None of that will change the facts on the ground. No matter how fine a job our troops do militarily, the only way to continue in Iraq is as an occupying force, with all the attendant cost in blood and money.

At some point we have to ask the question that should have been asked in Vietnam: Do the people we are supporting have different aims than we do, and if so, why are our soldiers continuing to die for them?