Bush draws Vietnam lesson for Iraq: Don't quit

Bush draws Vietnam lesson for Iraq: Don't quit
'We tend to want there to be instant success in the world'

US President George W. Bush, making his first visit to Vietnam, said that one lesson of the bloody US military defeat here a generation ago was that the United States must be patient in Iraq.

"We'll succeed unless we quit," promised Bush, the second US president to visit post-war Vietnam, after talks with close ally Australian Prime Minister John Howard on the sidelines of an Asia Pacific summit in Hanoi.

Bush's brief state visit here, 10 days after US voter anger over Iraq swept the opposition Democrats to control of the US Congress, has inevitably raised comparisons between the Vietnam war and the ongoing conflict in Iraq.

Asked whether the US defeat in Vietnam offered lessons, the US president replied: "We tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take a while."

Democrats have rallied behind calls for a phased redeployment out of Iraq, but the White House has rejected setting any firm timetable for bringing home the roughly 150,000 US troops there.

But Bush also hinted at the results of several efforts under way to revamp US strategy in Iraq, vowing to consult Howard on "any repositioning of troops, if that's what we choose to do."

"We've got a lot of people looking at different tactical adjustments. Once I make up my mind what those will be, I'll share it with him (Howard) right off the bat."

The meeting came as a heavyweight commission of US experts, led by former secretary of state James Baker, is expected to report next month with plans to revamp US strategy in Iraq.

Bush himself has removed US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and ordered a comprehensive, government-wide strategy review White House aides say could be complete within 10 days.

"The elections mean that the American people want to know whether or not we have a plan for success," said Bush.

"We're not leaving until this job is done, until Iraq can govern, sustain and defend itself."

Bush's predecessor Bill Clinton was in 2000 the first US president to visit Vietnam since searing images of US helicopters taking off from a Saigon rooftop went around the world in 1975.

John McCain, a Republican senator and presidential candidate, was shot down near here while a naval aviator during the war, a point Bush mentioned in his comments after meeting Howard.

In Vietnam, where the conflict is called the American War, the past is no longer an issue -- the communist country is too busy steering a boom that has made it East Asia's second-fastest growing economy after China.

Still, Hanoi strongly condemned the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, when a number of Vietnamese war veterans predicted a drawn-out conflict dominated by an interminable guerrilla campaign and heavy losses.

Three years on, US troops are still committed in Iraq as it slides toward civil war and where the US military death toll is heading towards the 2,900 mark.

Bush himself admitted last month that the spike in unrest in Iraq could be likened to the 1968 Tet offensive, which helped crystallize US public opinion against the Vietnam war.

US officials have back-pedalled since then. "Historical parallels of that kind are, I think, not very helpful, and I don't think they happen to be right," US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters en route here.