. . . But a U.S. Policy Czar Might Help

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Bush seemed to draw a comparison between Vietnam and Iraq last week during an interview with ABC News. It was left to author David Halberstam to point out that the important part of the exchange was that neither Bush nor his interviewer seemed to have a firm grip on what Vietnam's Tet Offensive had been about.

"I don't know what either of them is really saying," Halberstam observed on National Public Radio. "The president has been exceptionally weak on the history of the Vietnam War." Was Bush saying, implausibly, that "Tet was a victory for America but a political defeat, and therefore . . . the war is really going better than this momentary glitch shows?"

Halberstam is a voice worth listening to on this comparison. His dispatches from Vietnam argued initially that the conflict could be won if strategy and tactics were changed. Only later did he come to the conclusion that the conduct of the war had finally made it unwinnable.

It is not Bush's poor grasp of Vietnam but his poor grasp of Iraq that is the urgent problem. After Nov. 7 the president should stop pretending to run an Iraq policy that has in fact beached him like a dying whale. He should give a senior Republican wise person complete powers to steer a new course, guided by the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton study group and others.

George Shultz, Ronald Reagan's secretary of state (and, like Jim Baker, an ex-Marine), is the outstanding candidate for a salvage mission on Iraq. He will not want to become the Iraq czar. But if it happens, I will quickly offer Shultz my congratulations, and my apologies.

jimhoagland@washpost.com