George W. Bush has taken to portraying himself as a Harry Truman for the new century, another president who presided over an unpopular war and found himself derided and misunderstood by an ungrateful nation until history conferred greatness upon him.

If we wait for the verdict of history in 50 years or so, Bush tells himself and the rest of us, the nation will celebrate a great president who courageously brought democracy to the Middle East and peace to a world that didn’t, in his favorite word, appreciate him.

We’d hate to see our president have to wait 50 years before he could determine his place in history. He would, after all, be 111 years old and the news that history had also forsaken him would probably be dangerous to his health.

But the president needn’t wait that long for some clues that indicate history will see him as not another Truman, but as a sort of composite, a Lyndon Nixon, whose unpopular war model is not Korea, but Vietnam.

As the late David Halberstam points out in the final article he wrote for Vanity Fair before his death in April, “Truman had been forced into the Korean War in 1950 when the Chinese authorized the North Koreans to cross the 38th parallel and attack South Korea.” The act of aggression came just four years after Truman and other world leaders had presided over the founding of the United Nations and the invasion would be its first test and first failure. No, the Bush war model is not Truman’s war, but the Vietnam War of nearly 50 years ago.

“Going into Iraq was, in effect, punching our fist into the largest hornet’s nest in the world,” wrote Halberstam. “As in Vietnam, our military superiority is neutralized by political vulnerabilities. The borders are wide open. We operate quite predictably on marginal military intelligence. The adversary knows exactly where we are at all times, as we do not know where he is. Their weaponry fits an asymmetrical war and they have the capacity to blend into the daily flow of Iraqi life as we cannot. Our allies — the good Iraqi people the president likes to talk about — appear to be more and more ambivalent about the idea of a Christian, Caucasian liberation, and they do not seem to share many of our geopolitical goals.”

There you have it, Mr. President, an appraisal by an important journalist/historian, and no waiting.