WASHINGTON, March 20: Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger on Sunday offered words of sympathetic support to President George Bush, as the administration encounters eroding public support for US military involvement in Iraq.

Mr Kissinger, who served under Republican US President Richard Nixon during the tumultuous Vietnam war years, told CNN television’s ‘Late Edition’ program that his experience facing growing public opposition to that unpopular conflict gives him a unique window into the travails by the Bush White House in Iraq now.

“My heart goes out to the president because I’ve served in an administration that faced a very divided country in a very difficult set of circumstances,” Mr Kissinger told CNN, without invoking America’s military intervention in Vietnam by name.

The former top US diplomat said that the Bush administration deserves the benefit of the doubt as it struggles to find a way to quell mounting sectarian violence in Iraq.

“The president is trying to head out in a direction that avoids civil war in Iraq, and that prevents the insurgents from dominating and establishing some sort of fundamentalist regime,” Mr Kissinger said.

“I think we should attempt to work together on this. I would support the objectives,” he said, adding that for the time being ‘nobody has yet put forward a better program’. —AFP