Bush says Iraq may be like Vietnam

George Bush campaigning with Pennsylvania congressman Don Sherwood yesterday. Picture / Reuters

United States president George Bush has for the first time agreed that there could be similarities between the situation in Iraq and the Vietnam war.

Mr Bush was asked in an ABC News interview whether he agreed with an opinion by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that the current violence in Iraq was "the jihadist equivalent of the Tet offensive."

Bush responded: "He could be right. There's certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we're heading into an election."

The Tet Offensive helped turn US public opinion against the conflict in Vietnam, and the Republicans are currently down in the polls heading into November's mid-term elections.

The White House was playing down the remarks overnight, stressing that Mr Bush did not mean to imply that a similar turning point in the Iraq war had arrived.

"We don't think that there's been a flip-over point," Tony Snow, the President's spokesman, told reporters.

"From... the standpoint of this administration, we're going to continue pursuing victory aggressively." Nonetheless the allusion to the Tet Offensive was a real departure for Mr Bush, who hitherto has refused to accept any similarities between Iraq and the war in Vietnam, which lasted eight years and took over 55,000 American lives.

They were also an indication of how an ever more unpopular war has become an albatross around Republican candidates' necks in their struggle to retain control of Congress at the November 7 election.

An unprecedented 35 per cent of registered voters plan to cast their ballot to express opposition to Mr Bush, against just 18 per cent who said they would be voting to support the President.

Calls are multiplying, and not only from Democrats, for a phased withdrawal from Iraq - an idea is also being examined by the Iraq Study Group, the blue riband bi-partisan commission headed by the former Secretary of State James Baker due to issue its report in December or January.

But US troops will be in Iraq for years to come, top administration officials acknowledge.

"We ought to be able to reduce down our forces in the months ahead," promised Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary.

But Mr Bush told ABC that some of the 145,000 US troops deployed there would still be in Iraq when he left office in January 2009.

US commanders also publicly admitted yesterday that the two month long joint US-Iraqi drive to end the violence in Baghdad had to all intents and purposes failed.

The grim assessment, by the US military spokesman Major General William B. Caldwell, came as at least 38 Iraqis were killed in bombings in the north of the country, and the Pentagon announced that two more American soldiers had been killed on Wednesday, following the 11 killed on Tuesday.

October is shaping up as the deadliest for US troops in almost two years, as the overall death toll since the March 2003 invasion approaches 2,800.

The Baghdad security effort, announced amid much fanfare in August, "did not meet our overall expectations," and the latest surge in violence, over the Ramadan holy month, had been "disheartening," Major General Caldwell said.

He added the security measures were now being 're-focussed'.

He explicitly linked the bloodshed with the impending US elections.

- INDEPENDENT, REUTERS