Making it clear he will resist congressional pressure next month for an early withdrawal, he signalled that US troops, whom he hailed as the “greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known”, will be in Iraq as long as he is president. He also said the consequences of leaving “without getting the job done would be devastating”, and “the enemy would follow us home”.
Mr Bush’s speech came on the day that the US suffered one of its highest daily death tolls since the 2003 invasion, with 14 troops killed when a Black Hawk helicopter crashed.
In a speech to army veterans in Kansas City, Mr Bush invoked one of the US’s biggest military disasters in support of keeping troops in Iraq: “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’.”
The speech was aimed primarily at what White House officials privately describe as the “Defeatocrats”, the Democratic congressmen trying to push Mr Bush into an early withdrawal.
The issue is set to come to a head next month when the US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, gives a progress report to Congress.
Limited progress
Gen Petraeus is expected to say that the surge has produced military successes but that there has only been limited progress on the political front.
In relation to the latter, Mr Bush was forced to backtrack after 24 hours earlier expressing frustration with the Iraqi prime minister, Nour al-Maliki. Alarmed by the harsh reaction of Mr Maliki, Mr Bush hurriedly rewrote his speech to praise him: “Prime Minister Maliki’s a good guy, a good man with a difficult job and I support him.”
The speech overall reflected the White House belief that it is shifting American public opinion behind the surge — the injection of 30,000 extra US troops into Iraq that has brought the total US force in the country to its highest level, 165,000.
The Bush administration wants to keep the surge going until at least next April, at which point the overstretched military will be forced to begin reducing troop numbers anyway.
Vietnam references
Mr Bush, until Wednesday, had strenuously avoided making explicit references to Vietnam. It is a gamble, risking reminding Americans that Vietnam was a military quagmire and reminding them of the shambolic retreat from the embassy rooftop in Saigon on the day that a Black Hawk crashed in Iraq killing 14 US soldiers.
But Mr Bush tried to turn the argument around as he made a series of contentious political parallels. He argued that US involvement in the far east had turned it from a continent in 1939 with only two democracies — Australia and New Zealand — into one where democracy was the norm: he mentioned Japan, South Korea and Vietnam.
“In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule, in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution,” Mr Bush said.
Some historians argue that it was the US covert bombing of Cambodia that produced the Khmer Rouge rather than US withdrawal from Vietnam.
Mr Bush added: “In Vietnam, former allies of the United States and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousand perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.”