WASHINGTON - President Bush has called Iraq a crucial battleground in a decades-long struggle against Islamic terrorism.

"It's important for our fellow citizens to understand that failure in Iraq would be a disaster for our future," he told soldiers at Fort Benning, Ga., last week. "It's a different kind of war in which failure in one part of the world could lead to disaster here at home ... That is why we must, and we will, succeed in Iraq."

Historians and Middle East experts, however, say that America's last "long war," the four-decade Cold War against Soviet communism, offers some cautionary lessons as the nation debates its next moves in Iraq.

Previous presidents, they note, made many of the same arguments about Vietnam that Bush and his aides are making about Iraq: The war there was part of a larger struggle against a monolithic enemy, and Vietnam's neighbors would fall to communism like dominoes if the U.S. were defeated.

That turned out not to be true: The U.S. lost the battle in Vietnam but won the war against communism anyway...

Some administration critics think the concept of a "war on terrorism" is equally murky. They say the phrase puts too much emphasis on military action and overlooks the fact that Sunni and Shiite terrorists use the same tactics but are enemies, not allies.

"It shouldn't have been conceptualized as a war. Terrorism is not something you can make war against. Terrorism is a tactic, not a movement in itself," said Anatol Lieven, a strategist at the New America Foundation, a centrist think tank that leans toward Democrats. "Terrorism is not a free-flowing miasma of hatred. It flows from particular issues..."

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