The bellwether of the cautious establishment press, Bob Woodward, has finally unloaded both barrels on the Bush administration's Iraq policy, in his new book, State of Denial.

The media hoopla surrounding the book has focused mainly on the administration's deceptions surrounding the sorry state of affairs in Iraq and Andrew Card's attempts, with the apparent blessing of Laura Bush, to get Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld fired. Neither of these facts is surprising.

The real surprise in Woodward's book has received less attention: The Bush administration's main advisor during the war has been Henry Kissinger.

Kissinger, according to Woodward's book, apparently has convinced the Bush White House that any troop withdrawals from Iraq will start a wave of public pressure to pull out all U.S. forces from Iraq. He is probably right in this analysis.

But Kissinger missed the main lesson of Vietnam and is now missing it in Iraq. As the U.S. generals in Iraq know, killing more Sunni insurgents and Shi'ite militiamen than the United States loses of its own troops will not win a war that is fundamentally political.

As Lieutenant General William Odom (Ret.), former Director of the National Security Agency and opponent of the war, has noted, the Iraq situation will continue to deteriorate and the United States will eventually be forced to withdraw from Iraq. So withdrawing sooner, rather than later, according to Odom, will save U.S. lives and money and salvage what international prestige the United States has left.

If Nixon and Kissinger had followed similar advice in Vietnam, the United States, its military, and its international standing would not have been tarnished by four additional years of war. And even worse than Vietnam, continued U.S. occupation of Iraq is fueling and worsening the Islamic terrorist threat to the United States, according to an estimate from Bush's own intelligence agencies.

Most amazingly, Woodward's book indicates that General John Abizaid, the current chief of the U.S. military command that supervises the Iraq war, told U.S. Representative John Murtha, a decorated former Marine who advocates rapid U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, that he was very close to agreement with the congressman's position. When the commander in charge of the Iraq war believes that U.S. forces should be rapidly withdrawn from that country, that fact should be big news. But sadly it isn't.

Consulting Kissinger on how to successfully "win" a counterinsurgency is like getting advice from Mel Gibson on public relations. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger came into office in 1969 vowing to get the United States out of Vietnam, while achieving "peace with honor."

Four years and 22,000 American casualties later, Nixon and Kissinger settled for a face-saving peace settlement that they could have obtained shortly after they took office. The final agreement merely provided a "decent interval" between U.S. troop withdrawal and the fall of the South Vietnamese regime to the communists.

Yet Kissinger's version of these events is that by 1972, the United States had virtually won the Vietnam War, but Congress and the American people wimped out and snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory.

Although the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam in the Linebacker II air offensive of 1972 and threats of using nuclear weapons probably led the North Vietnamese to negotiate more seriously, Kissinger's argument that the United States had "won" the war is a fantasy. No one on either side of the ensuing negotiations believed that the North Vietnamese were going to honor the Paris Peace Accord after the United States left.

Even if one believes that the United States had won the war militarily, an effective counterinsurgency campaign also requires winning politically. Because the North Vietnamese were fighting for their own country and the United States was merely fighting in some faraway jungle, the North Vietnamese were prepared to take horrendous casualties to wait out the Americans.

As late as 1972, Nixon and Kissinger had a majority of popular support for the heavy Linebacker II offensive, and they, not the public, were the ones who were attempting to pressure the North Vietnamese to give them a "for show" peace deal that was a mere fig leaf. If the United States was winning the war, one should ask why Nixon and Kissinger were so eager to salvage any honor that the United States had left. In 1972, even Kissinger himself clearly wanted to end the war.

Even if the Congress and the American people were to blame for the loss of the Vietnam War, as Kissinger contends, politicians should take into account that democracies will not allow an indefinite waste of lives and money to win a war that has little to do with national security. And the Bush administration, after the Vietnam experience, should have known that the public tires quickly of such unneeded military adventures.

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Ivan Eland is a Senior Fellow at The Independent Institute, Director of the Institute's Center on Peace & Liberty, and author of the books The Empire Has No Clothes, and Putting "Defense" Back into U.S. Defense Policy.

I was a senior in high school, attending the American school in Wiesbaden, West Germany, where the US Air Force had its headquarters and where my father was stationed.

It was 1959, and the Cold War tension was focused on Berlin. Because that divided city was well inside the Soviet sector of East Germany, and because it served as an escape hatch for citizens behind the Iron Curtain, Nikita Khrushchev was pressing the French, British, and American forces to get out.

President Eisenhower was holding firm, insisting on a strict reading of the four-party treaty that had divided the city. The Soviets were looking for an excuse to call off the treaty, and that's where I came in.

My friends and I were fans of the Formula 1 automobile racing circuit, and a Grand Prix that year was to take place in Berlin. The flashpoint city was effectively off-limits to the like of us, but we went anyway.

A US Army train crossed through the Communist zone every day, carrying GIs and their dependents through East Germany to the island city. The Soviets hated this incursion, but the treaty allowed it. The treaty also underwrote strict regulations for the train, however, and American passengers were instructed in the rules by the military policemen who served as conductors.

When the train approached the East-West border, the military police went through the compartments, closing the window shades and explaining that lifting the shades was strictly forbidden. They gave absolute emphasis to the prohibition of any photography at the border. I have recounted this memory elsewhere, but it comes to mind in the context of recent news.

When the train hissed to a stop, we boy-adventurers in our darkened compartment could hear the barked orders outside, the familiar cadence of German, but also the odd sounds of another language we took to be Russian. It was like hearing the dialogue of a movie without being able to see the screen, and we simply couldn't resist. Up went the window shade, but only by an inch.

"Tanks!" my buddy whispered. "Red stars!"

Soviet troops were lined up to face-off with GIs, all with weapons ready. I was the one to put the lens of my camera at the small opening. I pushed the button. Before I knew it, the door behind us slammed open.

I was roughly jerked away from the window, and in a flash the back of the camera was open, the film unspooled and strewn around the compartment. It was the American MP, and his rough reaction was deliberate, a firm enforcement of border regulations to impress the Soviet and East German officers who were right behind him. They wanted at us, but the MP held them off.

After the East German and Soviet officers backed out of the compartment, the MP checked our identification and wrote us up. He was calmer now, but I sensed his contempt. As he handed my ID back , he looked at me hard and snarled, "Some damn fool like you is going to start World War III."

That rebuke lives in my memory as a measure of my own immaturity - a drastic failure to match my action to its potential consequence. I hear the MP's words now, however, as a judgment on contemporary American leadership.

World War III never came in the contest with Moscow, and though the image is sometimes evoked today to describe the war on terrorism, this is not World War III either. But the callow impulsiveness that risks catastrophe out of ignorance and self-centeredness does apply. That MP on the train was pronouncing a prophecy that has come true.

The National Intelligence Estimate that was partially declassified last week shows the government's own assessment of what has followed from President Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq - a decision he made in stark defiance of warnings of history.

"Anti-US and anti globalization sentiment is on the rise and fueling other radical ideologies," the estimate said. "This could prompt some leftist, nationalist, or separatist groups to adopt terrorist methods to attack US interests. The radicalization process is occurring more quickly, more anonymously in the Internet age."

The estimate itself thus points to a conclusion: Bush created a cohesive enemy where it did not really exist before. So-called jihadists have been rallied, strengthened, and made lethal by Iraq. They will haunt the world for years, in a global war unlike anything ever seen before. All of it unnecessary. Foolishness worthy of a stupid child.