Leon Panetta has been in politics as long as any of us can remember. He started out as a Republican, working in the office of Sen. Thomas Kuchel, R-Calif., in the late 1960s. (Kuchel belonged to the now-vanished species of moderate Republican and actually supported both the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.) He moved up quickly to become director of the Office of Civil Rights under Richard Nixon.

In 1971, Panetta quit the Nixon administration in protest over its racist policies, switched parties and went to work for New York mayor John Lindsay, another Republican-turned-Democrat. In 1976 he was elected to Congress, where he served until 1993. He then became director of the Office of Management and Budget and White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton, and for his final chapter in government served as Barack Obama's CIA director in the first term and defense secretary in the second. To say he's got extensive experience would an understatement.

Panetta has always been a centrist, and I've been critical of his "maverick" track record over the years -- he's had a tendency to burnish his own reputation to the detriment of those he works for. But at age 87, from his perch as the head of the Panetta Institute for Public Policy, it's hard to imagine he now thinks he has anything left to prove. So when Panetta appeared on CNN to talk about the Iran war, a subject he is well qualified to discuss, and says that it's shaping up to be "Trump's Vietnam," you can't help but be a bit startled. If anyone still in public life knows how much freight that phrase carries, it would be him.

That comparison might sound hyperbolic since Vietnam was a 20-year meat-grinder of a war that cost the lives of more than 50,000 Americans and something like 3.5 million Vietnamese, both troops and civilians. But Panetta drew the comparison based on the argument that Donald Trump's war was an equally terrible miscalculation of the adversary's resilience and commitment, where we're dealing with misinformation and propaganda coming from the U.S. administration and an untrustworthy negotiating partner on the other side.

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