U.S. POLICY IN IRAQ is haunted by Vietnam, no question about that. That's why Americans support the war and will keep on supporting it until we win. ("Win" is a verb you rarely heard in the Vietnam era.)

We are haunted by the image of Vietnamese who trusted and supported us trying frantically to grab a place on the last outbound helicopter; by Vietnamese putting to sea in rowboats rather than enjoy Uncle Ho's "Workers' and Peasants' Paradise" one more day. We are haunted by the consequences of allowing South Vietnam to collapse. Tens of thousands of executions (maybe 60,000), re-education camps where hundreds of thousands died, a million boat people.

We put them in those rowboats--we antiwar demonstrators, we sophisticated, smart guys. The war was nearly over when I graduated from high school. But high school students were old enough to demonstrate. They were old enough to feel superior to the fools who were running the government. And they were old enough to have known better. They were old enough to have understood what communist regimes had cost the world in suffering, from the prisons of Havana to the death camps of Siberia.

Today we are haunted, in thinking about Iraq, by the fact that a noisy, self-important, narcissistic minority talked the United States into betraying its allies. (Loyalty didn't mean a lot to antiwar demonstrators; honor didn't mean a lot.) We betrayed our allies and hurried home, to introspect. They stayed on, to suffer. We were eager to make love, not

It was my fault, mine personally; I was part of the antiwar crowd and I'm sorry. But my apology is too late for the South Vietnamese dead. All I can do is join the chorus in shouting, "No more Vietnams!" No more shrugging off tyranny; no more deserting our friends; no more going back on our duties as the strongest nation on Earth.

Before the switch of commanders from William C. Westmoreland to Creighton Abrams, we conducted the Vietnam War stupidly; that thought haunts us too, and that's why people like Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld are running the Iraq war and his Vietnam-era counterpart Robert S. McNamara and his friends and disciples aren't. We are haunted by our having gotten into Vietnam without really meaning to, without having thrashed it out first in a nationwide conversation. That's why the Bush administration laid out exactly what it wanted to accomplish (regime change) beforehand--and why the nation chewed the thing over for months before we opened fire. Regime change is what America wanted and what we fought for and won. Regime change is what we will defend, whatever it takes.

Does Iraq bring back memories of Vietnam? The president's critics say yes, and they are right. Vietnam came to mind when we saw Saddamites torturing their captives on camera. Do President Bush's opponents grasp that those are (or were) real people getting beaten to a pulp, mutilated, tortured, murdered? (If they did, wouldn't they be overjoyed now that the smug murderers have been thrown out, and radiantly proud of America?) Our moral obligations as the world's most powerful nation come strongly to mind when we hear about rape rooms and children's prisons; when we read about captives fed into industrial shredders, and swaggering princelings dragging women off the street to the torture houses.