President George Bush sought to buy more time for his Iraq "surge" strategy yesterday by making a risky comparison for the first time with the chaos that followed the US pullout from Vietnam. Making it clear he will resist congressional pressure next month for an early withdrawal, he signalled that US troops 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 Democratic congressmen trying to push Mr Bush into an early withdrawal. The issue is set to come to a head next month when US commander in Iraq Gen David Petraeus gives a progress report to Congress. He is expected to say that the surge has produced military successes but that there has only been limited progress on the political front.
The speech 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.
Freedom's Watch, a conservative group, yesterday launched a $15 million (€11,081,000) advertising campaign in 20 states saying: "It's no time to quit. It's no time for politics." Mr Bush's former White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, who works for the group, said: "We want to get the message to both Democrats and Republicans, don't cut and run, fully fund the troops, and victory is the only objective."
Mr Bush had avoided making explicit references to Vietnam. It is a gamble, 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 an area in 1939 with only two democracies - Australia and New Zealand - into one where democracy was the norm. He mentioned Japan and South Korea.
"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.
He said there had been lots of critics of US involvement in Vietnam at the time. But he quoted from Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American, the words "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused", implying that, with the benefit of hindsight, they were wrong, just as critics of the Iraq war will later be seen to be misguided.