WASHINGTON — As President Bush was preparing to announce plans to send more troops to Iraq earlier this month, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy chose to talk about another conflict.
"In Vietnam, the White House grew increasingly obsessed with victory, and increasingly divorced from the will of the people," the 74-year-old Massachusetts Democrat said in a speech to the National Press Club.
"We all know what happened, though," he continued.
"There was no military solution to that war.... In the end, 58,000 Americans died in the search for it. Echoes of that disaster are all around us today."
Kennedy mentioned Vietnam seven times in the speech, in which he outlined plans to challenge Bush's proposed troop increase.
Other members of Congress would follow.
On the floors of the House and Senate, in committee hearings and news conferences since the president's Jan. 10 announcement, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and both sides of the war debate have repeatedly invoked America's longest war.
Opponents use the vocabulary of the Vietnam War as they talk of opposing an escalation that they consider as divisive as those pushed by Presidents Johnson and Nixon in the 1960s and early 1970s.
And supporters of the president warn of repeating other mistakes of that conflict by withdrawing support for American soldiers while they remain in harm's way.
Capitol Hill even witnessed the recent return of one of the Vietnam era's icons, when former Sen. George S. McGovern of South Dakota, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, returned to offer lawmakers advice about ending this war.
Comparisons between the two conflicts are as old as the Iraq war itself -- and fraught with some peril, said Vassar College historian Robert K. Brigham, author of the recent book "Is Iraq Another Vietnam?"
"When you say 'escalation' like Vietnam, you are in a sense saying there is an escalation that has no end ... and 'phased withdrawal' rings of a retreat from Vietnam," Brigham said. "One thing we have to be careful of is that a lot of the references to Vietnam are intellectual shorthand.... Vietnam is a very complicated war to understand."
Just as Iraq and Vietnam are vastly different, the American military commitments in the two conflicts have striking differences.
At the peak of the Vietnam War, there were nearly 540,000 American troops in Vietnam. More than 58,000 were killed. In Iraq, troop levels have remained relatively stable at about 130,000, and more than 3,000 of them have died.
