LEWISTON – Four panelists who looked for similarities and differences in wars in Vietnam and Iraq found little agreement except in the complexity of the two situations.

The program took place Monday night before a large audience at the Muskie Archives at Bates College. Two of the participants, former U.S. Rep. David Emery, R-Maine, and Oliver Wolf, president of the Bates College Republicans, supported the war in Iraq. They saw the conflict’s basis as being different from the Vietnam War’s.

Wolf told the audience that he believes Sept. 11 stands as the first time “an ideology came to attack us.” He said that “radical Islam is the threat” that Americans have come to fear.

Noting the complexity of both political and grass-roots feelings in the Vietnam era and at the present time, Emery said, “There are times when intractable problems simply won’t yield to logic and reason.”

He said, “We must be prepared, when American interests or the rights of individuals are threatened, to back up the sterling words and golden promises with concrete action. That’s the situation in which we find ourselves in the Middle East.”

Forceful opposition to America’s role in Vietnam was expressed by Chris Beam, Bates College archivist and a lecturer in history, who teaches a course on the Vietnam War. Beam recalled joining the Marines and going to Vietnam, where, he said, his views were reversed.

“If I had been Vietnamese, I would have been a Viet Cong,” he said.

Although he called the American military effort a success, it was irrelevant in the end, Beam said. His reasons for that assessment included an assertion that the government in South Vietnam had “very little legitimacy.”

Tran Nguyen, a Bates sophomore from Hanoi, explained her understanding of the Vietnam War from the viewpoint of the country’s peasant population, who she said cared little whether the fight was about communism or democracy.

“It was always a question of our country or not our country,” she said, emphasizing that centuries of domination by other nations was the factor that led to the tenacious fight against American forces. She said the people basically feared more domination by another country after generations under Chinese and French rule.

Nguyen also said she could imagine much the same reaction among Iraqi people. Noting that Americans felt shock and insecurity after Sept. 11, she said that was much the way her countrymen felt about the war.

Emery, who represented Maine’s First Congressional District from 1975 to 1983 and served as President Reagan’s deputy director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, supported removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.

“It is absolutely impossible, in my opinion, to expect any improvement in conditions in the Middle East unless tyrants with the means, the ability and the track record to foment terrorism are removed,” Emery said.