BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

I can still remember the news clips: People hanging from helicopters hovering over the U.S. embassy in Saigon, South Vietnam, desperate to escape the final invasion by the North Vietnamese, fearing torture, imprisonment, and maybe death.

It was 1973. News wasn’t conveyed to us in real time, in real life like it is today. When the horrors of war were brought into our living room, it was, well, more horrifying and it stayed with you for a long time. In January of that year the combatants had signed a cease-fire agreement in Paris, but the fire only grew more intense. The North Vietnamese army was poised to overrun the entire country as soon as the Yankees left. In a little over a year, the North and the Viet Cong swept away the remnants of two decades of war with us and the French.

President Richard Nixon got us out of Vietnam the way President Barack Obama extracted us from Iraq, knowing full well, I suspect, that the country would soon fall to the enemy (in Iraq’s case probably through partitioning, while in Vietnam’s case, through reunification).

The Nixon and Ford Administrations and Congress refused to lend aid to South Vietnam as it fell to the North. Its corrupt ruler, Nguyen Van Thieu, left for a better life in Taiwan. The Obama Administration is doing the same today, “considering our options” and “reviewing” the situation, while another corrupt ruler, Nouri al-Maliki, gazes out the front window watching 90,000 of his own troops desert him.

Those of us who lived perilously close to, or actually in, the tragedy that was Vietnam, still think about the legacy of the 58,000 Americans who died there, the tens of thousands more who died later, a result of the war, or the 130,000 wounded and the trillion dollars, with a capital T, the taxpayers sacrificed to pay for the war.

Will our sons and daughters be asking themselves the same questions 40 years from now?  Will they be looking back at the fall of Iraq to extremists so vile and ruthless that even our enemies, al-Qaeda, won’t claim them, eerily wondering what the hell we were thinking, injecting ourselves into a thousand-year-old collision of cultures, religious extremism, and Middle Eastern economics and politics?

I suspect so.

Iraq, of course, is a long way from Vietnam in a lot of ways, if not geographically, certainly in the geopolitical, religious, economic, and cultural characteristics that have ignited the region and entrapped the West for centuries. It is a unique spot on the globe that has brought great powers to their knees throughout history.

But there are vague similarities in the U.S. involvement in Indochina and the Middle East from which lessons should be learned, many for the second or third time, but remembered this time.

The first is that the more complex a situation is the more likely it will require a long term entanglement. In our arrogance, we tend to underestimate the complexities of other cultures, worlds apart from us and we enter that fog not prepared to commit the resources to win the war and the peace and we are unwilling to fight the kind of war that needs to be fought on the soil, for sure, but also in the hearts and minds of both allies and adversaries. And, we don’t seem to think we need exit strategies sooner rather than later.

Both the Vietnam experience and the Iraq-Afghanistan experience seemed to be hampered from the outset by unclear or misguided missions, foggy outcomes, regional complexities we failed to appreciate, and military limitations in both objectives and cost. Vietnam went from a single, limited conflict in one half of one country to a multi-national war that spanned five presidencies with vastly different approaches to foreign policy.

Iraq and Afghanistan have become not just a point in history separated by two invasions of Iraq and a highly premature victory chest-thumping on an aircraft carrier, but an era, now spanning four presidencies and soon to become five, also with vastly different approaches to foreign policy in the region. In both periods, for a while, we were told and thought the military involvement would be of limited duration and that the costs would be bearable; they wouldn’t even require any increase in taxes. Right on. Peace, brother.

Second, we learned from the Vietnam experience, that American might and America’s global influence can be decimated for decades by defeat and humiliation.

The Iraq-Afghanistan experience has left America in worse posture, if that is possible. Look around: Northern Africa, the Middle East, the Far East, Eastern Europe, Central America. Crises abound. No one trusts us to lead the world toward solutions. We are weak and impotent. Throughout our history we have had great debates balancing the desirability of isolation or expansion. Now there is no debate, because we have no choice. Robert LaFollette, the isolationist Senator from Wisconsin in the 1930s would be intrigued to see this great transition from world leader to world lackey. Imagine what Valdimir Putin writes in his diary these days after he’s through flexing his newly sculpted muscles in what must be a full hallway of Kremlin mirrors.

How do we ever get our mojo back?

Finally, there were and are similarities in the impact of these two all-consuming engagements on the American psyche. Our Vietnam experience contributed to an oppressive atmosphere of public distrust and disillusionment that spiraled downward like a Kansas funnel cloud, into anger and revulsion.

The Iraq-Afghanistan experience was born of a great public high, the post-9/11 patriotic response to an attack on our shores, the worst in fifty years. The high sustained the engagement, breathing new life into our national resolve. But eventually, the war, like its predecessor, dampened public trust, public confidence, and public pride in its institutions and its leaders. Those leaders, from freshmen members of Congress to the President and his court jesters, have done precious little to regain that trust and restore a level of confidence needed to sustain even minimal self-governance. Instead, they have turned on themselves, in righteous indignation and ignorance of history.

In the HBO series Newsroom, the anchor of the network’s nightly newscast thinks he ought to resign as the result of a bungled national security investigative piece. He  whines to the network owner, Leona (played by Jane Fonda, who once sat atop a North Vietnamese gun emplacement), “Leona, we don’t have the trust of the public anymore.” Leona angrily responds, “Well, then get it back.” That is exactly what the President and Congress should spend every waking moment doing, especially now in the face of a momentous foreign policy failure.

It is sad and frustrating to watch Iraq fall, pulled down like the statue of Saddam Hussein a decade ago. Iraq is probably headed for another partitioning like so many other regions created by victors and their misguided manipulations of the spoils of war, spoils so unnatural and ill-conceived they inevitably fester and foment until another war moves the boundaries and displaces populations yet again.

The President and his crack team of foreign policy advisers, will assess, analyze, weigh some options, engage in reflective, sometimes angry and sometimes somber rhetoric, and come up with little, a word that aptly describes America on the world stage. They will come up with a posture, and that is all it will be, a face saver for us, but no help or hope for the people of Iraq, or for the people of Syria, where the Iraqi invasion is based, or for the region.

There will be finger-pointing, name-calling, blame-laying, pontificating and political posturing. The steam needs to be expelled. Then there must be something more, some way to get back, again, what we have lost, again: our stature, our belief in ourselves, the trust needed to govern ourselves, and a torch big enough to relight the beacon to the world we always promised to be.

Editors’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff.   He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.