Senator Kennedy, capping weeks of hysterical attacks on President Bush, has branded the war in Iraq as “George Bush’s Vietnam.” The Associated Press quotes him as alleging, in a speech at the Brookings Institution, that a pattern of deception and the administration’s efforts to dismiss any critics is undermining the public’s trust in government. And it may be that there are certain similarities between Vietnam and the situation that obtains today, where our enemies are again relying on an anti-war movement at home to sap our will to see the fight to the finish.

Vietnam, though, is an odd line of attack for the brother of John F. Kennedy. It was, after all, the 35th president who precipitated America into Vietnam after an inaugural speech in which he vowed that America would go anywhere and carry any burden in the cause of freedom. It was Senator Kennedy’s older brother who called Vietnam the “keystone” in the arch of freedom in Southeast Asia. It was JFK who created the force of Green Berets who were trained to fight a counterinsurgency not entirely unlike what our troops are fighting in Iraq today.

Mr. Kennedy is quoted by the AP as saying that Mr. Bush has created “the largest credibility gap since Richard Nixon.” That was another odd choice of phrasing, since it was not President Nixon who mapped the expedition into Vietnam but Mr. Kennedy’s older brother and the Democrat who succeeded him, President Johnson, against whom the “credibility gap” was charged. What Nixon did was map the retreat from Vietnam. He ran on a campaign of peace with honor only to be forced into an ignominious retreat by the 94th Congress, controlled by the Democrats.

Mr. Kennedy’s remarks illuminate nothing so much as the fact that his career has been marked by a break with his older brother and all that he stood for. The more the Democrats refer to Vietnam, the more they underscore its central relevance today. Senator Kerry speaks for the faction that believed American GIs in Vietnam were war criminals and that the leaders who sent them there were also war criminals. He helped establish the climate in which the Congress cut off aid to our Free Vietnamese allies while they were under fire. He is seeking now to create the same climate in respect of our troops — and the free government they are helping to establish -— in Iraq. That is what Senator Kennedy is talking about when he speaks of “George Bush’s Vietnam.”