Bush living LBJ's lesson

By Ron Hutcheson
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON - In the spring of 1964, an anguished President Lyndon Johnson vented his frustration over the war in Vietnam.

"I don't think it's worth fighting for and I don't think we can get out. It's just the biggest damned mess I ever saw," he told a top aide in a tape-recorded conversation. "It's damned easy to get in a war, but it's gonna be awfully hard to ever extricate yourself if you get in."

Now President Bush is living that lesson in Iraq, stuck in a box with no clear path to victory and no easy exit from an unpopular war. While Bush remains committed to his goal of a stable democracy, even he acknowledges that the current policy isn't working.