Bush: Iraq is not another Vietnam

President George W Bush has signalled he is ready to send more troops to Iraq while acknowledging that US forces had suffered a couple of “tough weeks” in the country.

At a combination speech and news conference at the White House, Mr Bush rejected a suggestion that Iraq was becoming another Vietnam – a quagmire without ready exit.

“I think that analogy is false,” he said. “I also happen to think that analogy sends the wrong message to our troops and sends the wrong message to the enemy.”

One year after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Mr Bush said a recent surge in savage violence is neither a civil war nor a popular uprising. “The violence we’ve seen is a power grab by … extreme and ruthless elements” from inside Iraq and from outside.

While the troops will remain, Mr Bush also said the US would stick to a June 30 deadline for handing over political power to Iraqis. He said a UN envoy would help decide which Iraqis would be placed in charge.

The President addressed matters of war and peace in the course of his hour at the podium, but election-year politics shadowed the proceedings.

Asked whether he believes he has acted correctly even if it costs him his job, he replied quickly, “I don’t intend to lose my job. Because I’m going to tell the American people I have a plan to win the war on terror.”

Iraq figures in Mr Bush’s decline in public opinion polls in two areas that are critical for his campaign leading up to the November presidential election. Approval of his handling of Iraq has declined to the mid-40% level, and approval for his handling of terrorism has dipped into the mid-50s. Growing numbers of people say the military action in Iraq has increased rather than decreased the threat of terrorism.

Mr Bush opened the news conference with a 17-minute statement – roughly the duration of a medium-length address to the nation.

While he opened with remarks about Iraq, the questions were broader – focusing as well on the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Mr Bush side-stepped at least two opportunities to say he wanted to apologise or take personal responsibility.

“Had I had any inkling whatsoever that people were going to fly aeroplanes into buildings, we would have moved heaven and earth to protect the country. Just like we’re working to prevent further attacks,” he said.

Asked whether he felt any responsibility for the attack, Mr Bush said he grieved for the families of the victims and said in retrospect he wished, for example, the Homeland Security Department had been in place. Bush did not say so, but even after the attack, he initially opposed creation of the agency. He changed his mind under prodding from lawmakers.

The President also said a highly publicised intelligence briefing he received on August 6, 2001, contained “nothing new” in terms of disclosing that Osama bin Laden hoped to attack the US. He was heartened, he said, by the disclosure that the FBI was conducting numerous investigations.

But that claim was undercut earlier in the day at a televised hearing by the commission investigating the terrorist attacks. Former Acting FBI Director Thomas Pickard testified he that did not know where the material came from, and one commission member, Slade Gorton, suggested many of the investigations related to fund raising, not the threat of attacks.

Mr Bush said he would investigate the matter.

April has been the deadliest month for Americans since Baghdad fell last spring. At least 83 US forces have been killed and more than 560 wounded this month, according to the US military, as American troops fight on three fronts: against Sunni insurgents in Fallujah, Shiite militiamen in the south and gunmen in Baghdad and on its outskirts. At least 678 US troops have died since the war began in March 2003.

Additionally, four American employees of a private security company working in Iraq were killed and their bodies mutilated two weeks ago, and an employee at another firm was seized as a hostage since last week.

Mr Bush said the United States was demanding the arrest or capture of Muqtada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric whose illegal militias are blamed for the mutilation of the four Americans. He said he had instructed the military to use decisive force if necessary to crush the insurgency.

He compared insurgents taking hostages in Iraq to radical Islamic fanatics around the world, saying they are “serving the same ideology of murder” of those who blow up trains in Madrid, bomb buses in Israel – or inflicted the worst attack in US history on September 11, 2001.

“None of these acts is the work of a religion,” Mr Bush said. “All are the work of a fanatical political ideology.”

He said the US would formally recognise the new Iraqi government once the June 30 transfer of power was completed and appoint an ambassador and open an embassy.

He also said he would send Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to the Middle East to discuss issues of “mutual interest” with nations there.

It was Mr Bush’s first prime-time news conference since March 6, 2003, just days before the opening of the war to depose Saddam. Mr Bush’s only other evening news conference was on October 11, 2001, a month after the terrorist attacks.