George W. Bush is no Lyndon Johnson.......

.....but he plays one on TV.

I was one of those who started making comparisons between Viet Nam and Iraq early on. Yes I am old enough to remember Viet Nam, in fact I'm old enough to have been drafted for it and I was. After Bush's pep rally, speech Tuesday night Richard Cohen now sees the similarities as well. On Tuesday night George W. Bush could have been channeling Lyndon B. Johnson, the deceptive rhetoric was the same.

Bush sounded downright Johnsonian in talking about progress in Iraq. He cited rebuilt "roads and schools and health clinics," not to mention improvements in "sanitation, electricity and water." This, too, had a familiar ring. We got the same sort of statistics in Vietnam. Some of them were simply concocted, but most, I think, were sort of true. Roads were paved, schools were opened and village councils were elected -- and yet, somehow, it never mattered. The newly elected village council could meet in the newly opened school and get there on a newly paved road -- and spend the night planning an attack on U.S. forces. It is all so depressing.

As it has consistently done in Iraq the administration does not recognize the similarities of the Iraq war to the Viet Nam conflict.

In Vietnam, it took the United States forever to recognize that it was fighting not international communism but a durable and vibrant nationalist movement led by communists. Something similar may be happening in Iraq. Yes, foreign terrorists are flocking to the country. But the Sunni insurgency is a different thing. The Sunnis may work with foreign terrorists and gladly use their expertise, but their goals are not the same. The salient and depressing fact remains that no insurgency can survive for long without either the cooperation or the apathy of the populace. Someone's making bombs, and someone's not turning him in. Bush may extol Iraqi democracy, but at the moment not enough Iraqis feel it is worth dying for.

As in Viet Nam the United States has become the enemy in Iraq. No government sanctioned by the United States can ever gain credibility with the Iraqi people. I admit that when the US withdraws it will not be pretty but at the same time it's not pretty now and it won't start to improve as long as US troops are on Iraqi soil. The US is a big part of the problem and it's presence in Iraq cannot be part of the solution.

So what did we get from George W. Bush Tuesday night? Vietnam-speak.

This is the language used by the Johnson and Nixon administrations to obscure the truth by emitting a fog of numbers. Thus Bush cited the "8 million Iraqi men and women" who voted, the "30 nations" with troops in Iraq (a total joke, and the president knows it), the "40 countries" and "three international organizations" that have pledged "$34 billion" in reconstruction assistance (another joke), the "80 countries" that recently met in Brussels to aid Iraq, and the "160,000 security forces trained and equipped for a variety of missions" -- one of them being, clearly, to stay out of harm's way.

The war Bush declared to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction is not the war being waged. The two have only one thing in common: rhetorical sleight of hand. Yet the consequences of pulling out of Iraq would be awful. The day Saigon fell I was ashamed for my country -- an ugly, disgraceful retreat. I don't want that to happen again. But unless Bush rethinks his strategy, fires some people who long ago earned dismissal, examines his own assumptions (what's the point of continuing to isolate Iran and Syria when we need them both to seal Iraq's borders?) and talks turkey to the American people, he will lose everything good he set out to do, including the example Iraq could set for the rest of the Middle East. I know Iraq is not Vietnam. But Tuesday night it sure sounded like it.