Christopher Marquis, in the NYT (Feb. 10, 2004):

Poor Lyndon B. Johnson. More than three decades after he entered the history books by micromanaging the Vietnam War, President Bush on Sunday invoked his heavy-handedness as the essence of what to avoid on the battlefield.

Mr. Bush did not name Johnson; he did not have to. The image of an ill-tempered and stressed president poring over maps and picking out bombing targets in South Vietnam is an enduring one of L.B.J. Mr. Bush, with his own worries in Iraq, plainly does not want to emulate his fellow Texan.

"The thing about the Vietnam War that troubles me as I look back was, it was a political war," Mr. Bush told Tim Russert on Sunday on "Meet the Press." "We had politicians making military decisions. And it is lessons that any president must learn, and that is to set the goal and the objective and allow the military to come up with the plans to achieve that objective."

Clearly, in Mr. Bush's book, a president needs to set the parameters of war, then know when to get out of the way. But what did he mean when he called Vietnam "a political war"? And how is it different from the battle being waged for Iraq?

"The shadow of this war is the Vietnam War," said Moisés Naím, the editor of Foreign Policy magazine. "Did the United States get entangled in something that's going to be a mess, and victory is impossible to achieve? He was clearly trying to differentiate between the two wars."

For some, Mr. Bush's distinction requires some fine-tuning. After all, academic and military experts agree, all wars are, in some sense, political. Carl von Clausewitz, the father of modern military strategy, made the unassailable point nearly two centuries ago: war is the extension of politics by other means.

In Mr. Naím's view, the president branded Vietnam as "political" to portray it as a war of choice, as opposed to the fight for Iraq, which, by his lights, was not optional.

Eliot A. Cohen, a professor of strategic studies, said one of the first things professors taught in war colleges was that politics pervaded war. "It's probably the most important thing to understand," Professor Cohen said. He is the author of "Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime" (Free Press, 2002), which reportedly found its way onto Mr. Bush's summer reading list a year ago at the urging of Mr. Bush's political adviser, Karl Rove.

Professor Cohen argues against conventional wisdom. He makes the case for an active, inquiring and unapologetic political leadership in time of war. Presidents should not be reluctant to overrule their commanders, he says. "It's important for politicians to be intimately involved in the conduct of war," Professor Cohen said. "It's always right to probe."

Georges Clemenceau, the French statesman, is said to have enshrined that view in the comment: "War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men."

Victor Davis Hanson, a military historian at California State University at Fresno, says wars are begun and shaped by politicians, even as the military prosecutes them. Political leaders have concerns that stretch from the geopolitical to the parochial, and these determine the nature of the battlefield on which commanders must fight.

"You don't just turn it over to the military commanders," Mr. Hanson said. Mr. Bush, he said, "believes that a commander in chief has to be engaged on a daily basis" in the conduct of the war. "That being said," he added, "he doesn't want to fall into the L.B.J. trap, saying `We're going to bomb here and here.' "