It is a desperate move for President Bush to invoke Vietnam as justification for staying longer in Iraq. But his speech yesterday was the first of two in which he called on Americans to take a long view of the Iraq conflict and argued that the lesson of history was that some wars took a long time to win.

His history lecture is disputable, not least in his elision of Vietnam and Cambodia. However, he is beyond controversy at the banal core of his main point: that Iraq has not yet come right but could in the future, although he skirted around the US’s almost complete lack of control over that course of events.

But the oddity of Bush’s comparison between Iraq and Vietnam, the twin peaks of contemporary US foreign misjudgment, is that it reveals the absence of the US’s vision of its role in the region. There has been a wisp of a sense, in the Administration’s arguments for sitting tight in Iraq, that it believes that the US cannot afford to leave for fear of the regional turmoil that might follow, a case that Bush expanded yesterday. But although this is his best argument, it is pursued with none of the tenacity of the Vietnam-era visions of communist dominoes toppling on to one another, exaggerated as they turned out to be.

Bush chose as his audience a gathering of Veterans of Foreign Wars – just as Barack Obama, Democratic presidential hopeful, did the previous day (when he called for a steady withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq). One of the unadvertised rewards for past military service in controversial wars is to be the target of political lobbying in perpetuity.

Iraq timeline: five years of conflict

From accusations that the weapons of mass destruction dossier had been sexed-up to withdrawal of British troops from Basra

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Bush pointed to South Korea and Japan as examples where US persistence had helped to build democracies. “The ideals and interests that led America to help the Japanese turn defeat into democracy are the same that lead us to remain engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said. But one problem with this equation is that the Taleban have not been neatly defeated, and while the US dispatched Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s civil war bears little comparison to Japan after the Second World War.

He also argued that “the defence strategy that refused to hand the South Koreans over to a totalitarian neighbour helped raise up an Asian Tiger that is a model for developing countries across the world, including the Middle East”. True, the Asian examples are an inspiration for development worldwide. But Bush (and others) ignore the profound differences between the Asian tigers and much of Africa or the Middle East, which have enabled the tigers to transform themselves while leaving other desperate countries behind.

Vietnam, Bush acknowledged, was a “complex and painful subject for many Americans”, and too big for one speech. Those concessions hardly neutralise the power of the V-word, which Bush has barely uttered since the Iraq invasion.

The aim of his politically expensive comparison was to argue against a rapid US withdrawal from Iraq. In Vietnam, he said, “the price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like ‘boat people’, ‘reeducation camps’ and ‘killing fields’.” It would be wrong to be distracted by his mislocation of Cambodia’s “killing fields” — the result of the brutal agrarian revolution of the Khmer Rouge, who rose to power on the back of fury against US bombing of North Vietnamese supply lines. He is right that a US exit from Iraq might allow even more bloodshed.

But it is his only good point. Bush’s speech yesterday, and US strategy in the region, lack direction now that pursuit of democracy has been dropped. Iraq at the moment is an advertisement for the ugliness of majority rule. After four years the US has failed to establish whether Iraq’s Shia majority is prepared to share power in order to unite the country in the US model. Unless it does, the only reason for staying is to stave off an unforeseeable but worse future.

Persistence has a value, but it has to serve a purpose, and in Iraq, as in Vietnam, the US’s goals may be out of its reach. To the extent that Bush’s rash comparison with Vietnam is justified, it undermines his case.

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