Bush's brain is still AWOL, having learned nothing during the Vietnam war he repeats it in the Iraq war.

The Guardian:

"America has never really got over that morning in Saigon. Today, 31 years later, George Bush arrives in Hanoi for a visit steeped in the legacy of an old defeat - and haunted by the prospect of another.

Vietnam and Iraq - it is the comparison that the Bush administration has resisted since the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Weeks later, the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was snapping at reporters for even daring to suggest that America faced an organised resistance. But by last month, one of the bloodiest since the war began, even Mr Bush was forced to concede that there were points of comparison. He likened events in Iraq to the Tet offensive of 1968, which turned US public opinion against involvement in Vietnam.

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."