In Vietnam, Bush warns against giving up
HANOI, Vietnam – President Bush said today the United States’ unsuccessful war in Vietnam three decades ago offered lessons for the American-led struggle in Iraq. “We’ll succeed unless we quit,” Bush said shortly after arriving in this one-time war capital.
Bush met here with Australian Prime Minister John Howard, one of America’s strongest allies in Iraq, Vietnam and other conflicts. The president said there were lessons to be learned from the divisive war fought and lost in Vietnam as the United States wages an unpopular war in Iraq.
“We tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take a while,” the president said. He called the Iraq war a “great struggle” and said, “It’s just going to take a long period of time for the ideology that is hopeful – and that is an ideology of freedom – to overcome an ideology of hate.”
Over time, the United States and Vietnam have reconciled their war differences.
Bush said he found it hopeful that countries can “move beyond past differences for the common good.”
As his motorcade moved through Hanoi, Bush passed Truc Bach lake, where then-Lt. Cmdr. John McCain, now a Republican senator from Arizona, was captured after parachuting from his damaged warplane. McCain spent more than five years as a prisoner of war
The collision of past and present seemed to affect Bush.
“Laura and I were talking about how amazing it is that we’re here in Vietnam,” the president said.
“My first reaction is history has a long march and societies change and relationships can constantly be altered to the good,” Bush said
Bush flew here from Singapore after warning a nuclear-armed North Korea against peddling its weapons and vowing the United States will not retreat into isolationism.
Vietnamese officials greeted Bush and his wife upon their arrival at the airport on a humid and hazy morning. Two young women, wearing traditional white garments called ao dai that flowed with the breeze, presented each with a colorful bouquet of flowers.
Interest in Bush’s arrival seemed subdued compared with the massive, joyous crowds that stayed up late for President Clinton’s unannounced midnight flight into Hanoi’s international airport in 2000.
With all traffic halted, many Hanoi residents paused on their motorbikes as the president’s motorcade sped through the capital where signs of poverty and commerce collided. Other clusters of onlookers gathered outside storefronts along the dusty streets. But while a few waved and smiled, most looked on impassively.
Bush came to Vietnam for a summit of Asia-Pacific leaders and individual meetings with a handful of leaders – all of them curious whether election setbacks had unsettled Bush.