Change a name here and there...

and it's impossible to tell then from now. From The Best and the Brightest, by David Halberstam:

For machismo was no small part of it. He had always been haunted by the idea that he would be judged as being insufficiently manly for the job, that he would lack courage at a crucial moment. More than a little insecure himself, he very much wanted to be seen as a man; it was a conscious thing. He was very much aware of machismo in himself and those around him, and at a moment like this he wanted the respect of men who were tough, real men, and they would turn out to be the hawks. He had always unconsciouly divided the people around him between men and boys. Men were activists, doers, who had conquered business empires, who acted instead of talked, who made it in the world of other men and had the respect of other men. Boys were the tolakers and the writers and the intellectuals, who sat around thinking and criticizing and doubting instead of doing.

p. 531. Lyndon Johnson, or George W. Bush?

We would once again try to do something on the cheap, and yet, even though it was at a bargain-basement price, we would be conveying to Hanoi the intensity of our will and commitment, and they would thus quickly come to their senses. Perhaps the greatest illusion was the idea that we cared more for what was going on than they did, that we would pay a higher price, that they would feel the threshold of pain before we did. It was of course an obvious lie; but the principals had, in their desire not to come to real decisions, painted themselves into a corner where lie followed lie.

p. 578. Hanoi, or Baghdad?

...Johnson was impressed that Westmoreland was straight from West Point (that hope still burned, that myth that the problem with the ARVN was a lack of training; Americans had been training the Vietnamese army for a decade, and still held to the hope that more training was the solution.)

p. 560. Sound eerily like 'We'll stand down as they stand up'?

 So [Clark] Clifford repeated it: if we won, after all that time, with all that investment, "What do we do? Are we still involved? Do we still have to stay there?"

And [Gen. Earle] Wheeler answered yes, we would have to keep a major force there, for perhaps as long as twenty or thirty years. Whereupon the conversation again when in different directions and the question of the figure [of how many soldiers needed] was dropped.

p. 596-597. The "then what" question that was never answered then, and has never been answered now.

In his attempt to keep the planning for the war as closely held as possible, Lyndon Johnson would not give accurate economic projections, would not ask for a necessary tax raise, and would in fact have his own military planners be less than candid with his own economic planners, a lack of candor so convincing that his economic advisers later felt that McNamara had seriously misled them about projections and estimates. The reasons for Johnson's unwillingness to be straightforward about the financing were familiar. He was hoping that the worst would not come true, that it would remain a short war, and he feared that if the true economic cost of the war became visible to the naked eye, he would lose his Great Society programs.

p. 604. Substitute "tax cuts" for "Great Society programs", and this could have been written about Iraq.

Both GWB and LBJ refused to face reality about a military conflict, lied to the American public about the casus belli, surrounded themselves with supporters and shut out dissenters, and accused reporters and anyone else criticizing their policies as unpatriotic and harming the troops. Maybe the lesson we should learn from Vietnam is don't elect Texans to the White House! (Even faux Texans like GWB.)