Two retired Army generals toured New Hampshire last week, hoping to pressure New Hampshire's congressional delegation to stand up to President Bush and put an end to the war in Iraq.

Republican Sen. John Sununu is up for re-election in 2008, and some believe he could fall prey to a similar antiwar sentiment that helped oust two incumbent congressmen in favor of Democratic Reps. Paul Hodes and Carol Shea-Porter in 2006.

Lt. Gen. Robert Gard worked as executive assistant to Robert McNamara, secretary of defense during the Vietnam War. He believes Iraq, like Vietnam, is a failure, and the only responsible solution is to bring American troops home, he said.

"These troops are not expendable commodities to fulfill the pipe-dream vision of a group of people trying to remake the world in our image," Gard said. "It's time for us to get the hell out of there."

Gard and retired Brig. Gen. John Johns teamed up with Win Without War, a group that formed in 2002 in response to the buildup to the invasion of Iraq. Led by former Maine congressman Tom Andrews, the group lists 40 coalition members including Greenpeace, Peace Action and MoveOn.org.

Andrews, Gard and Johns held town hall meetings in Manchester and Keene last week and met with the Monitor's editorial board Thursday.

Terrorism threatens the United States, but the war in Iraq is exacerbating the problem, not solving it, the generals said.

Gard, a graduate of West Point and Harvard who served 31 years in the Army, said the idea that "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" is empty rhetoric used to keep Americans scared so they don't question the administration's foreign policy. Fighting in Iraq will not stop someone who wants to blow up a dirty bomb in New York.

"These people are mobile," Gard said. "If they want to come in here, they'll come."

Johns said the military can't fight terrorism on its own. The United States must also look for political solutions, he said.

"It's a war of ideas, it's not a military war," Johns said. "Raw military force is more limited in its usefulness than ever in the history of mankind."

Johns served as a combat arms officer for 26 years and taught leadership and ethics at the U.S. Military Academy before he retired from active duty in 1978. He then worked at the Department of Defense, serving four years as deputy assistant secretary of defense before becoming a political science professor at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C.

Gard, who served combat tours in Korea and Vietnam, said the situation in Iraq is "hauntingly similar" to the spring of 1968, when 25,000 troops were sent to Vietnam to bolster forces there.

"At that point in time, we had lost 24,000 U.S. killed in action," he said. "Five years later, we had 34,000 more killed in action, a total of 58,000. And I would assert that we got no better settlement five years later than we could have had at the time of the surge in Vietnam."

The generals briefly recounted mistakes made early in the Iraq war that allowed a culture of lawlessness to spread and promoted a vigorous insurgency - invading with too few troops, turning a blind eye to looting and disbanding the Iraqi army.

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