Baby boomers see parallels, some painful, to '60s

<snip>Now for Iraq, a topic that this columnist through sheer will has avoided for seven paragraphs. As heart-rending as the United Nations hotel bombing and the almost daily casualty reports may be, there should be a reluctance to resort to most facile Vietnam War analogies. But what do you do when the phrase ''guerrilla war'' automatically triggers long-ago memories and the demand for more troops carries with it echoes of Lyndon Johnson and Gen. William Westmoreland?

Those who learned about the Vietnam War in 11th-grade history class may find it easier to repress the temptation to indulge in historical parallels. But for those of us shaped by the Vietnam experience on the battlefield or the home front, it is nearly impossible to banish recollections of an unwinnable conflict in a far off land.

For three decades, America has been spared recriminations over wars that did not go exactly as planned. But now that we seem mired in one, those of us who lived through the '60s can't simply turn off deeply ingrained memories by uttering the incantation, ''No more Vietnam syndrome.'' To what event are we supposed to compare Iraq? The invasion of Grenada?

The situation in Iraq is especially distressing to those who were skeptical about the war from the outset. It is irresponsible to talk, as some leftist groups do, about bailing out of Iraq and bringing American troops home by the Christmas holidays. Yet the alternatives are also troubling. How many more soldiers will it take to pacify Iraq? It may be tempting to demand that Bush turn to the once-spurned U.N. Security Council for major assistance, but that may be one of those expedients that sounds more convincing on a TV talk show than it is in reality. Arguing over the United Nations at this stage seems somewhat akin to those high-decibel 1960s debates over a bombing halt in Vietnam.

The '60s marked a watershed in American life in ways that had nothing to do with Vietnam. This was the decade when we began to discover that the American Dream was constructed on top of a shoddy infrastructure. The first New York City blackout, as we were dramatically reminded last week, occurred in 1965. The '60s also provided the first intimations that we cannot always race from here to there because of snarled highways, crowded sky lanes and decaying railroads.

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