As President Bush was preparing to announce plans to send more troops to Iraq earlier this month, Sen. Edward Kennedy talked about another conflict.

"In Vietnam, the White House grew increasingly obsessed with victory, and increasingly divorced from the will of the people," the Massachusetts Democrat said in a speech to the National Press Club.

"We all know what happened, though," he continued. There was no military solution to that war . . . . In the end, 58,000 Americans died in the search for it. Echoes of that disaster are all around us today."

Kennedy mentioned Vietnam seven times in the speech.

Other members of Congress would follow.

On the floors of the House and Senate, in committee hearings and news conferences since the president's Jan. 10 announcement, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and both sides of the war debate have repeatedly invoked America's longest war.

Analogies between the two conflicts are as old as the Iraq war itself - and fraught with some peril, said Vassar College historian Robert Brigham, author of the book Is Iraq Another Vietnam?

"One thing we have to be careful of is that a lot of the references to Vietnam are intellectual shorthand . . . . Vietnam is a very complicated war to understand," he said.

The American military commitments in the conflicts have striking differences. At the peak of the Vietnam War, there were nearly 540,000 American troops in Vietnam. In Iraq, troop levels have remained relatively stable at about 130,000, and more than 3,000 have died.

Nonetheless, the president's proposal seems to have rekindled a debate on Capitol Hill about America's last prolonged war and what lessons can be drawn from it.

For critics of the Bush plan, Vietnam has provided ammunition to bolster their calls for congressional intervention to end the current conflict.

"If the lesson in Iraq teaches anything, it is that military might has very great limitations," Sen. Robert Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat, said on the floor of the Senate. "But then that is a lesson we should have learned many years ago from Vietnam."

Byrd, a longtime war opponent who has been in the Senate since 1959, is one of seven current senators who were elected before the end of the Vietnam War.

Several of the president's congressional allies have argued that the price of leaving Iraq would be much higher than that of leaving Vietnam.

"We were able to walk away from Vietnam," said Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican and former Navy fighter pilot who spent seven years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. "If we walk away from Iraq, we'll be back, possibly in the context of a wider war in the world's most volatile region."

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