In the winter of 1968, Gen. William Westmoreland requested that President Lyndon Johnson provide an additional 200,000 U.S. troops to be deployed to Vietnam. Despite the pressure from the hawks in his administration and despite the embarrassment suffered by the United States during the communist-led Tet Offensive, LBJ turned down the escalation.

Today, it seems that many within the U.S. military command are at best skeptical that a surge of U.S. forces in Iraq will have a positive effect in quelling the raging civil war there. Nevertheless, President Bush and the military chiefs he has found who are willing to agree with him have decided to disregard many of his current and former military advisers and to proceed with a troop escalation.

The difference in these two scenarios is stark. In 1968, when Johnson stood up to his military, he realized that the military solution was not going to work and that if he was going to leave a positive legacy he would have to make diplomacy work. He knew for sure that the Congress and the American people would not tolerate more and more deaths. The political decision had to trump the military one. The fact that during the last nine months of his presidency Johnson failed to achieve a diplomatic resolution was not a function of his decision to turn down the impulse to escalate.

President Richard Nixon’s decision to sustain and expand the military confrontation led to at least five more long years of fighting — delaying, and ultimately vindicating, LBJ’s call for accelerated diplomatic initiatives. Even Nixon opted to pursue a diplomatic solution, which Secretary of State Henry Kissinger finally implemented. With President Gerald Ford replacing Nixon, the last helicopter lifted off from the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.

Bush’s decision to pour more troops into Baghdad not only suggests a failure to read contemporary United States foreign policy but also demonstrates arrogance toward the American people and a growing bipartisan coalition within Congress.

The military situation in Iraq is rapidly deteriorating, with American casualties mounting. There is no clear, reasonable U.S. strategy in sight. Iraqi forces are not showing any genuine effectiveness in taking hold of the military effort than they have previously. The government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has not demonstrated any genuine political leadership or a serious willingness to implement a political compromise with his partners/adversaries. To date the al-Maliki government appears to be prepared to let the U.S. forces protect the regime for as long as the United States can be persuaded to stay, after which they are prepared to let all hell break loose as they run for the hills.

What is different between the quagmire in Vietnam and the current abyss in Iraq is the role and position of Congress and that of the American people. While Congress introduced many resolutions to cut off funding for the Vietnam War, at no time did the antiwar forces gain sufficient bipartisan congressional support to implement such resolutions. Since the 110th Congress arrived on Jan. 4, even skeptics have suddenly begun to suggest that this Congress might well take unprecedented steps to restrict funding for a presidential troop escalation in Iraq.

Members of the House as well as the Senate on both sides of the aisle demonstrated in their first week of congressional hearings a sense of frustration bordering on anger with Bush’s flimsy justification of the surge as well as the subsequent rationalization presented by his surrogates appearing on Capitol Hill. There will be a congressional move to intensify the debate and demand accountability from the White House. What is unclear is whether lawmakers will actually transform their dissatisfaction into legislative action to prevent or restrict U.S. engagement.

The Democrats, to give themselves political cover, will not move to restrict funds without at least some significant support from Republicans. At the same time, few Republicans will attach themselves to any legislative initiative without a sense that it is justified politically by public outcry.

Most of the debate hinges on the continuing outrage on the part of the American people. Polls show overwhelming public dissatisfaction with Bush policy and the “surge.” And yet the American people still have not yet taken to the streets, as they did during the days of the Vietnam era. That today’s young, unlike those who drove the moratorium movement in the ’60s and ’70s, are not subject to a draft removes some of the compelling character that was part of the former antiwar movement.

Finally, global strategists and international experts are barely getting a hearing within the walls of the White House. The Bush administration is suffering from a very serious case of myopia, focusing only on perpetuating the myths of why the United States went to war in the first place. Like many of those who got America into Vietnam, administration officials cannot admit their mistakes. Bush appears to be giving only lip service to matters such as Muslim internecine rivalries and radicalism, regional instability, the Iranian nuclear threat, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. The president’s team is focused on only reiterating that it was right to go to war in Iraq before it hands over the mess to Bush’s successor. This time, however, the global stakes appear to be dramatically higher than they were in the Vietnam era and are being ignored at our great peril.