KANSAS CITY, Mo., Aug. 22 — With a tough battle with Congress over the future of the war expected to come in September, President Bush offered a rousing defense of his Iraq policy today, declaring that he envisions an American victory there and asserting that a hasty withdrawal by the United States would unleash a bloodbath reminiscent of the Vietnam War era.
“It’s not up to the politicians in Washington, D.C., to say whether he will remain in his position,” President Bush said of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq.
Related
News Analysis: Bush Takes a Step Away From Maliki (August 22, 2007)
The Lede: Bush’s Iraq-Vietnam Parallel (August 22, 2007)
Text of Speech (whitehouse.gov)
Video: Speech Excerpt
Reach of War
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More Video »Mr. Bush accused the Congress of planning to “pull the rug out from under” American troops. He said the American pullout from Vietnam more than 32 years ago was to blame for millions of deaths in Cambodia and Vietnam, and for putting a dent in American credibility that lasts to this day.
“Then, as now, people argued that the real problem was America’s presence, and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end,” Mr. Bush told an audience at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention here today. “The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be.”
Mr. Bush’s speech was interrupted frequently by cheers from the crowd and by occasional standing ovations.
“The question now before us comes down to this,” he said. “Will today’s generation of Americans resist the deceptive allure of retreat, and do in the Middle East what veterans in this room did in Asia?”
With his comments, Mr. Bushtried something that few leading politicians of either party have tried in a generation: Reopening the national argument over the Vietnam War, a conflict that ended more than three decades ago but has remained an emotional national touchstone.
And he was giving rare political voice to the views of those who — like many in the hall today — believe that the American pullout from Vietnam was a mistake, and who reject the popular view among Baby Boomers that America should never have sent troops there in the first place.
Mr. Bush’s speech today is part of a new White House effort to draw a second — or, in some cases, third, fourth or fifth — look from a skeptical public at the his argument that the United States should not withdraw from Iraq now.
Perhaps unsurprisingly — and as the White House probably expected — his comments prompted an immediate and bitter debate.
“The president is drawing the wrong lesson from history,” said Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, whose brother John F. Kennedy oversaw some of the early American troop escalations in Vietnam as president. “America lost the war in Vietnam,” Senator Kennedy said, “because our troops were trapped in a distant country we did not understand, supporting a government that lacked sufficient legitimacy with its people.”
Mr. Bush’s comments came as he and Congressional Democrats — and even some Republicans — are preparing for an autumn of debate over the future of the conflict. Though a number of politicians are saying now that they see signs of military progress resulting from the stepped-up troop levels Mr. Bush ordered this year, an even greater number are saying that the Iraqi government is failing to take advantage of that progress to do the work necessary to bring political reconciliation.
On a day when Mr. Bush had hoped to be driving his own message about the war while Congress was on vacation, the president’s aides spent the morning disputing assessments that he was losing faith in the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.
On Tuesday, the United States ambassador to Iraq, Ryan C. Crocker, said in Baghdad that American support for the Maliki government was not written on a “blank check,” and Mr. Bush responded to a reporter’s question about Mr. Maliki with comments that were seen as less than strongly supportive.
Today, to beat back that perception, Mr. Bush told the audience at the veterans’ convention that the prime minister was “a good guy, good man with a difficult job.”
Apparently addressing a call by Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, for the Iraqi parliament to replace Mr. Maliki — a call echoed in softer and more diplomatic tones by Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia — Mr. Bush said today: “It’s not up to the politicians in Washington, D.C., to say whether he will remain in his position. That is up to the Iraqi people, who now live in a democracy and not a dictatorship.”
At a news conference in Syria today, Mr. Maliki reacted angrily to the calls by American politicians for the Parliament to replace him, calling the demands “discourteous” — a particularly strong insult in a culture where pride and personal relationships are paramount. He said, as he has before, that no one outside Iraq had any right to impose timetables or benchmarks on the Iraqi government, and that if Americans withdrew their support, his government could find another patron less to their liking, such as Syria or Iran.
Mr. Bush, in his speech to the veterans, urged Americans to remember that the American military not only helped to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan but also helped to install democracies there, and that America’s sacrifices on the Korean Peninsula have helped preserve a prosperous, democratic South Korea that exists in stark contrast to the militarily powerful but impoverished North.
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