Escaping Washington, But Not Escaping Iraq

By Mike Allen

In one of the last strongholds of communism, George W. Bush worshiped in a wooden pew at a hybrid Catholic-evangelical service--"a moment," he later called it, "to converse with God in a church here in Hanoi." Earlier, his presidential motorcade had sped beneath a hammer and sickle formed from red and yellow lightbulbs, a reminder that the world does not change as fast as he would like. The reluctant traveler dropped into the capital of his least favorite analogy as part of a sweep through Southeast Asia that allowed him to look commanding, even regal, at a time when postelection Washington is buzzing about the onrushing twilight of his presidency. "Happy to find a receptive audience," he slyly told fawning musicians in Singapore, an earlier stop, after he answered their entreaties to tap out a tune on their Asian xylophone, with surprisingly melodic results.

Bush had come to Hanoi, once the capital of godless North Vietnam, for an annual international forum, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting. Attendance at such summits is perhaps the part of the presidency he will miss least, press conferences excepted. And this time, he had more to fret about than staged intimacy and flabby bloviating. What about a nation that overwhelmingly backs its President when he sends troops into battle, then sours on the idea when swaths of society decide that intervention was a mistake? That was the U.S. in 1968, and it's the country Bush could wind up leading if the public decides that comparing Iraq with Vietnam is no longer so rash and ignorant a thing to do as Bush's aides have been insisting it is for the past three years.

Fifteen years ago, in the flush of his Gulf War triumph, President George H.W. Bush crowed to state legislators, "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all." But now, as Washington's wise men look for a way out of a situation in Iraq , the symptoms of that malady seem to be reappearing. Asked in the Rose Garden in June if he saw a parallel between Iraq and Vietnam, the President replied curtly, "No." But he is now embracing the inevitable, and he answered yes last week when asked roughly the same question at the Sheraton Hanoi. "One lesson is, is that we tend to want there to be instant success in the world," he said. "And the task in Iraq is going to take a while."

So is the modernization of Hanoi, where the streets are strung with drooping skeins of hundreds of electrical wires, some of them powering a single home that has run a line into the tangle. The streets are also clogged with schools of motor scooters, with most of the riders free of helmets but laden with comically massive loads--a quartet of big-screen TV sets, exquisitely balanced piles of lumber, pyramids of water bottles.

Although Bush plans to visit the thriving stock exchange in Ho Chi Minh City--formerly Saigon--this country is still officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. As protocol demanded, he met with the General Secretary of the Communist Party and was photographed with a massive bust of the revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh. The President said one of the most poignant moments of the trip was passing the lake that Senator John McCain, as a Navy pilot, was pulled from after his plane was hit while on a bombing run. "He suffered a lot as a result of his imprisonment," Bush said, "and yet we passed the place where he was, literally, saved, in one way, by the people pulling him out." In fact, McCain was met onshore by a large, hostile crowd, which hit, kicked and even bayoneted him. Aides admitted later that the President's telling, although accurate, was incomplete.

Behind the scenes, Bush mused to aides that he loved what he was seeing and regretted he would never be able to come to a place like this as a normal tourist. Instead he pursued a fairly restricted itinerary, visiting the U.S. military's Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command and skipping the Turtle Temple and the stir-fried camel. Asked at a briefing why the President wasn't out more among the people, National Security Adviser Steve Hadley said the motorcade routes through the heart of the city meant that the President was "in the midst of the Vietnamese people all the time" and added that Bush "has been doing a lot of waving." His hosts seemed to want to reciprocate. When CNN International began airing a taped package using footage from the Vietnam War to suggest similarities between Iraq and Vietnam, the local feed was obscured by an overlay of music and a Vietnamese flag. For at least a few days, a graying President could enjoy Vietnam instead of wrestling its ghost.