Today in a speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Salt Lake City, President Bush drew an analogy between the U.S. forces’ ongoing efforts in Iraq and a previous generation’s struggle in World War II:

From the beaches of Normandy to the snows of Korea, courageous Americans gave their lives so others could live in freedom. Since the morning of September the 11th, we have known that the war on terror would require great sacrifice, as well. [8/22/05]

Previously, Bush has called on the memories of the Revolutionary War, World War I, the Korean War, and even the Civil War to bolster support for the Iraq war effort.

Predictably, Bush has never compared the current conflict to Vietnam. But Senator Chuck Hagel, a decorated veteran of that conflict, suggests that’s the war from which we should be drawing lessons:

“We’re past that stage now because now we are locked into a bogged-down problem not unsimilar, dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam,” Hagel said. “The longer we stay, the more problems we’re going to have.

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Recent reports show an serious uptick in attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan. This year is “already the deadliest for American soldiers” since the war was launched in 2001, with sixty-five American casualties in the first nine months. Taliban fighters have also killed “more than 800 Afghan officials, police, troops, aid workers and civilians since March,” and the violence is “likely to intensify” before September’s elections.

The reports clearly demonstrate that Afghanistan is not the open-and-shut “success story” that conservatives often describe. Just as important, they show that the CIA was correct when it predicted earlier this year that “Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was in Al Qaeda’s early days, because it is serving as a real-world laboratory for urban combat.”

Consider this portion of the New York Times report this morning:

More money is coming in, probably from Arab countries, and a unit of Qaeda fighters has returned to [Afghanistan] from Iraq to teach local fighters an unspecified “new tactic they learned in Iraq,” one security official said, explaining that he could not be identified because of the clandestine nature of his work.

Likewise, Knight-Ridder reported on 8/17/05:

Borrowing tactics from their counterparts in Iraq, [Taliban fighters] beheaded alleged informers and staged two suicide bombings, a form of terrorism rarely seen in Afghanistan.

In other words, President Bush’s defense strategy has not only turned ‘New Iraq’ into the old Afghanstan, but is also on its way to turning the ‘New Afghanistan’ into a second, violence-torn ‘New Iraq.’

“The advance of women’s rights and the advance of liberty are ultimately inseparable.”
– President Bush, 3/14/04

“President Bush has made the advance of women’s human rights a global policy priority. … We all have an obligation to speak for women who are denied their rights to learn, to vote or to live in freedom.”
– First Lady Laura Bush, 3/8/05

“The commitment of this administration to women’s rights in Iraq is unshakable.”
– Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, 3/9/04

“There can be no compromise on the principle that Iraqis can each have an equal role in the building of their country’s future without regard to their ethnic or religious background or gender.”
– U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, 8/8/05

VERSUS

According to Kurdish and Sunni negotiators, the US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, proposed that Islam be named “a primary source” and supported a wording which would give clerics authority in civil matters such as divorce, marriage and inheritance.

If approved, critics say that the proposals would erode women’s rights and other freedoms enshrined under existing laws. … Dozens of women gathered in central Baghdad yesterday to protest against what the organiser, Yanar Mohammad, feared would be a “fascist, nationalist and Islamist” constitution. “We are fighting to avoid becoming second class citizens,” she said.

Yesterday on Meet the Press, Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) said that President Bush started lobbying for an invasion of Iraq long before significant diplomatic efforts began:

SEN. LOTT: Well, beginning in August that year and into the fall–in fact, beginning not too long after 9/11–as we had leadership meetings at breakfast with the president, he would go around the world and talk about what was going on, where the threats were, where the dangers were, and even in private discussions, it was clear to me that he thought Iraq was a destabilizing force, was a danger and a growing danger, and that we were going to have to deal with that problem.

DAVID GREGORY: He has described going to war in Iraq as the last resort that was a war of necessity. Are you suggesting here that, in fact, before much of the diplomacy had begun, that the president thought or believed in his mind that war was an inevitability?

[Snip]

SEN. LOTT: …I–but the short answer to your question–I think that he felt like we were going to have to deal with the problem before some of the diplomatic efforts occurred, and I don’t mean that critically. But it was my impression.

As David Gregory notes, this runs completely counter to how President Bush describes the decision to invade Iraq: Read more