President George Bush's latest effort to rally support for his Iraq policy has touched a nerve in Vietnam, where previous US intervention led to the deaths of millions of people.

In a speech to US war veterans yesterday, Mr Bush invoked the Vietnam war, saying that widespread death and chaos would envelop Iraq if the US troops left too quickly, as he claimed had happened when America pulled out of Vietnam three decades ago.

But people in Vietnam, where opposition to the US intervention in Iraq is strong, said today that Mr Bush had drawn the wrong conclusions from the conflict.

"Doesn't he realise that if the US had stayed in Vietnam longer, they would have killed more people?" said Vu Huy Trieu of Hanoi, a veteran who fought against US troops in Vietnam. "Nobody regrets that the Vietnam war wasn't prolonged except Bush."

Vietnam's official government spokesman offered a more measured response. "With regard to the American war in Vietnam, everyone knows that we fought to defend our country and that this was a righteous war of the Vietnamese people," said the foreign ministry spokesman Le Dung. "And we all know that the war caused tremendous suffering and losses to the Vietnamese people."

Mr Dung said Vietnam hoped that the Iraq conflict would be resolved "very soon, in an orderly way, and that the Iraqi people will do their best to rebuild their country".

Although Vietnam opposed the US intervention in Iraq, Mr Dung stressed that ties between Hanoi and Washington had been growing closer since the former foes established friendly relations in 1995.

In his remarks in Kansas City yesterday, Mr Bush said that a hasty retreat from Iraq would lead to terrible violence.

"One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps' and 'killing fields'," he said.

But many people in Vietnam said the comparison was ill-considered.

The US could not have overcome the will of the Vietnamese people no matter how many bombs it dropped, said Mr Trieu.

"Does he think the US could have won if they had stayed longer?" Mr Trieu asked. "No way."

The only way to restore order in Iraq was for the US to leave, said Trinh Xuan Thang, a Hanoi university student.

"Bush sent troops to invade Iraq and created all the problems there," he said, adding, "suicide bombing was unheard of before."

If the US withdrew, he said, the violence might escalate in the short term but the situation would eventually stabilise. "Let the Iraqis determine their fate by themselves," Mr Thang said. "They don't need American troops there."