Iraq may or may not be another Vietnam, but the politics of this new war are showing a strong similarity to that old war.

In this replay, Joe Lieberman plays the part of Lyndon Johnson, Ned Lamont is Eugene McCarthy and the Republicans are looking for another Richard Nixon, who can win the presidency by promising to achieve an honorable settlement for an unpopular overseas conflict.

In 1968, a liberal Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, was forced into retirement by a primary challenge from Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota.

McCarthy's big issue, of course, was the Vietnam War.

Johnson didn't start Vietnam, but he escalated it during his presidency until the Democratic Party rebelled. Johnson had long been a hero to Democrats for his effective leadership on liberal causes such as civil rights and the war on poverty.

But by 1968, the unpopularity of the war had swallowed all that good will.

Similarly today, Lieberman has a Johnson-like profile: pro-big war, pro-big government. Lieberman didn't start the war either, of course, but he would have if he could have; he has been a ready and steady advocate of “regime change” in Iraq since the 1990s.

And so President George W. Bush famously kissed him on national TV in 2005. And by 2006, a majority of Connecticut Democrats no longer cared that he had been a stalwart liberal on most domestic issues; as happened to Johnson four decades previously, the doves rose up and ate the hawk. When blood is being spilled, foreign policy trumps domestic policy.

And now, of course, the Democratic doves are out to destroy, or at least convert, the rest of the party's hawks. It's safe to bet that no pro-war Democrat can survive the coming blog-slaught to win the 2008 presidential nomination.

But the sphere of Democratic primaries in either 1968 or 2006 is just a subset, to be sure, of the overall American electorate.

Democrats may naturally lean toward dovishness, but the country as a whole is, well, more hawkish.

Still, few Americans anywhere like protracted wars that don't seem to be well-planned and don't seem to be headed toward victory.

Back in the late 1960s, amid the frustrations of Vietnam, most Democrats decided that they wanted, simply, “peace now.” But most Americans didn't agree; they had no wish to “cut and run.” The national majority wanted an “honorable” solution that might not be victory but also wasn't defeat.

Today, not many Americans think that the Iraq war is going to turn out as promised by Bush and Lieberman, but they still don't want to see our adversaries triumphant, perhaps causing a domino effect across the Middle East.

So the challenge is to find a president who can finesse the situation. In 1968, the answer was not a hawkish Democrat like Johnson, or a dovish Democrat like McCarthy. Instead, the man of the moment was ex-Vice President Nixon, who positioned himself as an experienced, problem-solving moderate.

During the 1968 campaign, Nixon pledged that he had a “secret plan” for ending the Vietnam War with “honor,” and so he won the White House that November.

And, it might be noted, he did have a secret plan - the opening with China - and he did end the war, eventually. Those policy successes earned him an overwhelming re-election in 1972, when he trounced another “peace-now” Democrat, Sen. George McGovern.

So to 2008. The neo-McGovernish Lamontized Democrats are going to lurch left. And at the same time it's hard to imagine any Republican winning the White House by promising to “stay the course” in Iraq. Instead, what the voters are looking for is a candidate who pledges to wind down the war in a way that spares America from humiliation. It might be hard to see who that candidate is right now, but it's easy to see such a candidate winning big.

Pinkerton is a Newsday columnist