Hanoi, Vietnam ? Returning to the world stage after an election rebuke, President Bush told foreign leaders Friday that he remains determined to “get the job done” in Iraq.

“We’re not leaving until this job is done, until Iraq can govern, sustain and defend itself,” he told reporters after meeting with Australian Prime Minister John Howard on the sidelines of a 21-nation summit in Hanoi.

Bush said he assured Howard that the United States wouldn’t abandon Iraq as a result of the Democratic takeover in Congress.

“There’s a lot of questions, I know, in the press about our troop posture and about the attitudes of our government,” Bush said. “I assured John that we will get the job done.”

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice echoed the president’s assurances and downplayed the election results in an interview with CNBC Asia.

“It’s not at all unusual for presidents to lose seats in Congress in their sixth year. But they are then still the president of the United States,” she said. “This president has a very clear agenda.”

Bush arrived in Vietnam on Friday for the annual Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, a weekend gathering of nations from both sides of the Pacific Ocean. The president said his trip has stirred memories of a war that roiled his generation and claimed more than 58,000 American lives.

On his way into Hanoi from the airport, Bush and his wife, Laura, passed by Truc Bach Lake, where Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., then a young Navy airman, was plucked from the water after his aircraft was shot down. McCain spent five years in a prison known to its American captives as the “Hanoi Hilton.”

“We were talking about how amazing it is we’re here in Vietnam,” Bush said. McCain “is a friend of ours. He suffered a lot as a result of his imprisonment, and yet we passed the place where he was literally saved, in one way, by the people pulling him out.”

Bush, who rejects suggestions that Iraq is fast becoming a Vietnam-like quagmire, said the lesson from Vietnam is that positive change takes time. Although the United States failed to keep South Vietnam from falling under the control of communist North Vietnam, the unified country has embraced capitalism and become a trading partner.

“We tend to want there to be instant success in the world,” he said. “It’s just going to take a long period of time for the ideology that is hopeful – and that ideology is freedom – to overcome an ideology of hate.”

After meeting with top Vietnamese leaders, Bush traveled to the communist party’s Hanoi headquarters for a closed meeting with party officials. At a later state banquet in his honor, Bush avoided any mention of the U.S. role in a war that claimed more than 1 million Vietnamese lives.

“The American people welcome the progress of Vietnam,” he told his hosts.

Although the primary focus of the weekend summit is the promotion of free trade and economic development, Bush is also working behind the scenes to increase pressure on North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program. He’ll meet today with leaders from South Korea and Japan, two key players in the standoff.

After testing a nuclear device on Oct. 9, North Korea agreed to revive negotiations over its nuclear ambitions. The so-called six-party talks – a discussion that involves North Korea, South Korea, Japan, Russia, China and the United States – have sputtered on and off without producing tangible results.

Still, Bush said he’s hopeful that North Korea’s offer to resume the talks could lead to a resolution.

“We have a chance to solve this issue peacefully and diplomatically,” he said.