Standing in Hanoi a couple days ago, President Bush was asked if the US's experience in Vietnam offered lessons when dealing with the situation in Iraq.  From the AP's story (which, oddly enough, the NY Post doesn't identify as such):

Powerful reminders of the fighting three decades ago remain in Hanoi.

Asked if the experience in Vietnam offered lessons for Iraq, Bush said, "We tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take a while."

He said "it's just going to take a long period of time" for "an ideology of freedom to overcome an ideology of hate. Yet, the world that we live in today is one where they want things to happen immediately."

"We'll succeed unless we quit," the president told reporters.

Excuse me?  Um, is the President thinking of the same war that I am?  I know that Dubya's main focus during the Vietnam War was staying the hell out of it.  This would explain his utter lack of knowledge of the war including such basic items as, well, who won.

Vietnam was a failure of will?  Is President Bush asserting that if Nixon and Kissinger hadn't signed the Paris Peace Accords in 1973 and withdrawn from Vietnam, the US and the Saigon government would have prevailed?  I kind of doubt that...and even if we had managed to "win", at what price?  How many more millions of dollars and thousands of lives would have been wasted?

It's long been clear that Bush doesn't learn from mistakes -- his or anyone else's -- so I'm not quite sure why I'm surprised at this.  But one would hope that we could draw greater lessons from the American experience in Vietnam than that.