Four decades separate the war in the jungle from the war in the desert, yet the current president from Texas sounds eerily similar to another president from Texas.

George W. Bush says, “Now is the time, and Iraq is the place.” Lyndon B. Johnson said, “The time is now, and the place is Vietnam.” Bush says, “Bring ’em on.” Johnson said, “Nail the coonskin to the wall.”

Bush says, “We are fighting that enemy in Iraq … so that we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities.” Johnson said, “If we quit Vietnam, tomorrow we’ll be fighting in Hawaii, and next week we’ll have to fight in San Francisco.”

Bush says, “America’s objective in Iraq is limited.” Johnson said, “We seek no wider war.” Bush says, “We must not waver.” Johnson said, “We will not grow weary.” Both said America couldn’t “cut and run.” Both called critics “nervous nellies.”

And with a mere 24 weeks remaining in the 2004 presidential race — the first wartime election since the Vietnam era — it is now increasingly clear that the conflict in Iraq is threatening to consume the Bush presidency, much the way Vietnam bedeviled LBJ.

Robert Dallek, a major LBJ biographer, said the other day in Washington, “There are powerful echoes of Vietnam right now, and Americans are picking up on that. The Bush people suffer from the same self-intoxication as the Johnson crowd, the same messianic impulses, the same delusional thinking about how they’re going to work their will in a foreign land. Human nature doesn’t change. Power is an aphrodisiac.”

Bush supporters, such as Republican Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon, reject all Vietnam parallels and laud this president for toughness. As Smith said in an interview, “The terrorists smell weakness a mile away, and we’ll win only if we are resolute.”

But an increasing majority of Americans have lost faith in Bush’s war stewardship, because of the abiding gap between optimism (“Mission Accomplished”) and reality. That verdict was rendered in the national polls even before Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz — who promised 14 months ago that the Iraqis would “view us as their hoped-for liberators” — told Congress on Thursday that Bush wanted an additional $25 billion, with more requests to come.

Waning support

Support for the war has been sliding for months, but it’s the prisoner-abuse scandal that has sharpened the decline; in the latest CBS News poll, 60 percent of independents (the swing voters) fault Bush’s handling of Iraq, 64 percent of all respondents say the war isn’t worth the further loss of American lives — the worst ratings for Bush since the war began.

Tim Lomperis, a Missouri political analyst who served two tours in Vietnam as a military-intelligence officer and who has viewed the goals in Iraq as worthy, said the other day: “Most people appalled by the mistreatment of those prisoners don’t necessarily think of Vietnam, not consciously. But there are obvious parallels.

“That kind of abuse was widespread in Vietnam. It happened because there was incredible frustration — as in Iraq today, where things are in complete disarray and the situation is horrendous. You didn’t know who the enemy was, or who your attacker was. The definition of victory became increasingly elusive, and you lived in a climate of moral ambiguity.”

Idealistic missions

Both wars were launched on the basis of dubious intelligence about the threat to national security. In both wars, presidents charted idealistic missions (stop communism, spread democracy), without adequate knowledge about the cultures they sought to change. This is evidenced by the failure to win hearts and minds; a new poll, conducted for coalition forces, reports that 82 percent of Iraqis disapprove of the U.S. military).

In both wars, the defense secretaries (Robert McNamara, Donald Rumsfeld) underestimated enemy strength, despite warnings from the military. And in both wars, presidents felt the need to recast bad news as good news. (Bush has said that the “desperate” attacks against U.S. troops are a sign of U.S. success.)

Lyndon Johnson prosecuted Vietnam, at great cost to his credibility, for nearly four years before most Americans soured on the war. The military draft exacerbated their opposition; so did a hefty tax hike in 1968.

Bush has lost majority support for his war in a mere 14 months — despite his having required no such sacrifices at home.

Casualties telling

The bad numbers don’t surprise Kenneth Campbell, a Vietnam veteran who teaches the war at the University of Delaware. He said: “We’re already at the same point, in public opinion about Iraq, that we reached in 1968 during the Tet offensive — when people saw the significance of the heavy (enemy) resistance, and a big increase in (U.S.) casualties.

“Our casualties in Iraq aren’t as great. But today, because of what happened in Vietnam, it takes fewer casualties before Americans lose patience. People don’t want to sit around and wait for 20,000 lives to be lost. Particularly now that we’ve lost the moral high ground (because of the abuse scandal). If morality is not on your side, it disempowers you.”

America’s future choices in Iraq — stay the course? send more troops? pull out? — also stir painful memories. Those choices, and the relevance of Vietnam, will be debated in this campaign, so perhaps only this comment, from the other Texas president, is beyond dispute:

“War is always the same. It is young men dying in the fullness of their promise. Therefore, to know war is to know that there is still madness in this world.”