Bush: Iraqi war may be like Vietnam war 

Source: Xinhuanet

10-20-2006 14:39

An Iraqi policeman walks past a burning vehicle at the site of a suicide car bombing in Kirkuk, northeast Iraq on Thursday, Oct.19, 2006. (Xinhua/AFP Photo)

BEIJING, Oct. 20 (Xinhuanet)-- For the first time, U.S. President George W. Bush has admitted "there could be similarities" between the situation in Iraq and the Vietnam war, according to media reports Friday.

The war in Vietnam lasted some eight years and killed 55,000-plus American lives, while the Iraqi war, since March 2003, has registered an overall death toll of 2,800 and "is expected to shape up more and more deadlier."

Answering questions if he agreed with an opinion by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that the current violence in Iraq is "the jihadist equivalent of the Tet offensive," Bush said, "He could be right."

Moreover, realizing the Tet offensive of 1968 in Vietnam helped turn U.S. public opinion against the war, and currently the Republicans are down in the polls prior to the mid-term elections, Bush said, "There's certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we're heading into an election."

The White House, in a quick attempt to downplay Bush's words, stressed the president did not mean that was a turning point in the Iraq war as in the Vietnam war.

"We don't think that there's been a flip-over point," the President's spokesman told the media. On the contrary, he added, "We're going to continue pursuing victory aggressively."

However, the allusion to the Tet offensive is viewed widely as a real departure for Bush, who hitherto has refused to accept any similarities between Iraq and the war in Vietnam, and also an indicator of how ever more unpopular the war in Iraq has become and how ever more difficult the task has become for the Republicans to keep their control of Congress in the Nov. 7 elections.

According to the latest polls, as high as 35 percent of registered voters planned to vote to express opposition to Bush while just 18 percent said they would support the president in the voting.

There are repeated, multiplying calls, not only from the Democrats, for a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. But the troops seem to remain there for years as Bush said some of the 145,000 deployed in Iraq would still be there when he leaves the White House in January 2009.

Editor:Wang Ping