GEORGE BUSH WAS A C STUDENT at Yale during the early years of the Vietnam War, so it's possible he never heard one of the oft-cited aphorisms adopted by the anti-war movement during those troubled times: Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Such grand words fit both the decade of the 60's and the nature of the conflict. Vietnam was an American tragedy, a war that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of young men and boys drafted right out of high school. What's happening in Iraq today more closely reflects the words of an unlikely pairing of philosophers, Karl Marx and Yogi Berra, one who wrote, "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce." the other who said, "It's deja vu all over again."

Tragedy or farce, America is doomed to repeat the sad slow bloody exit our our military from foreign soil where once again, despite ample advance warning, we ventured into the wrong war in the wrong country for the wrong reasons. We know we can't just leave Iraq, not merely because of the 3,000 American lives we've anted up already. We owe it to the two or three innocent Iraqis still living in a country filled with people who can't wait to kill each other in the name of Allah. We owe it to the millions of people around the world who still look up to us as America the Good, and not American the Bungling Superpower.

And we owe it, yes, to the murderous bastards just waiting to take over Baghdad the minute we leave. There is a difference between Iraq and Vietnam. When Saigon fell, the North Vietnamese army swept in from outside the city. When Baghdad falls, it will be at the hands of the enemy already living there.

The day after President Bush addressed the nation and called for a surge of 21,500 American troops to stabilize Baghdad, I saw a photo in the paper that, as Popeye would say, shivered me timbers. It showed President Gerald Ford seated behind his desk in the Oval Office in April 1975 discussing a plan with his two top aides to send 20,000 American troops to Saigon to secure the capital for evacuation as North Vietnamese troops approached.

Saigon fell before the 20,000 troops could be sent overseas, but what shook me, what I marveled at were the youthful faces on the two top aides sitting across from the president: Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. First as tragedy, second as farce.