LANDMARKS.(The Talk of the Town)

Last week, midway between Iraq's surprisingly successful Election Day and President Bush's State of the Union address--in which he asserted, not unreasonably, that the election proved that "the Iraqi people value their own liberty"--excerpts from a purported newspaper clipping began rocketing around cyberspace, from Web sites to inboxes to chatrooms and back around again. At first glance, the item looked like a bit of Internet apocrypha, but a visit to the microfilm reader proved it to be genuine.

U.S. ENCOURAGED BY VIETNAM VOTE, ------, Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror, ------, By PETER GROSE , Special to The New York Times

WASHINGTON, Sept. 3--United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting., According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong. . . ., A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam.

Most of those who passed around this scrap of 1967 historical flotsam probably meant it as no more than a prudent caution against irrational exuberance. ("A flawed analogy, but resonant all the same," was one correspondent's accompanying note.) For others, no doubt, it was a petulant denial that something good might actually have happened in Iraq on George W. Bush's watch. Either way, it wouldn't be the first time that "landmark events in the history of liberty," to borrow a trope from Bush's speech, have been greeted sourly in certain quarters back home.

"We must not be euphoric," a senior American official grumped in the autumn of 1989, as Europe was exploding with joy at the fall of the Berlin Wall. "We have to be a little reserved about formulating major policy shifts until we have an opportunity to see what happens," he muttered. "I'm as enthusiastic as anyone else, but behind what's left of the Wall, there are still three hundred and eighty thousand Soviet troops in East Germany," he groused. The senior official, who has since ascended to even more senior officialdom, was Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. Three years earlier, as a congressman, Cheney had been similarly churlish--and similarly blind to the power of the democratic spirit--when he voted against a resolution calling for the South African regime to release Nelson Mandela from prison and negotiate with the African National Congress, on the ground that Mandela and his organization were terrorists who would establish a Communist dictatorship.

Cheney was wrong about the durability of the Soviet bloc and wrong about the villainy of Nelson Mandela, and it may yet turn out that the clipping-clippers are wrong about the possibility of something like democracy in Iraq. No one knows. There are plenty of Vietnam echoes in America's Iraq adventure, especially in the corrosive effects on domestic comity, the use of false or distorted intelligence to create a sense of immediate threat, and the arrogance, combined with ignorance of local realities, of many senior strategists. But the differences are large, beginning with the nature of the enemy. The Vietnamese Communists possessed a legitimacy derived from thirty years of anticolonial struggle--against France, then Japan, then France again, and, finally, willy-nilly, the United States. Iraq's insurgency has support in the Sunni minority, but it is no national liberation movement. And ...