Bush creates his own Catch-22

United States President George W Bush is not the first person to comment on the similarities between Iraq and Vietnam. His critics have been doing it for years, warning that Iraq risks becoming the US's 21st-century Vietnam - a military quagmire in which troops can neither advance, nor, with honour, retreat, The Dominion Post writes in an editorial.

But Mr Bush had a different purpose last week when he addressed a veterans' conference in Kansas City. He argued that the US had to remain in Iraq till the country was stable. A sudden US withdrawal would condemn Iraq to the same fate as Vietnam and Cambodia after the US retreat from Vietnam.

"In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation, torturer and execution," he said. "In Vietnam, former American allies, government workers, intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps where tens of thousands perished."

For obvious reasons Mr Bush chose not to remind his audience of the diplomatic and military support the US gave the Khmer Rouge after its forces quit Vietnam, or the fact that it was Communist Vietnamese troops who eventually brought down Pol Pot's murderous regime. Nor did he mention the role the US played in the 1980s in the blocking of the establishment of a tribunal to try the Khmer Rouge's leaders for war crimes and genocide.

However, Mr Bush has a point. A US withdrawal from Iraq will lead to further bloodshed as the warring factions currently separated by 160,000 US troops are given free rein. If remaining in the country offered Iraqis the hope of a peaceful future, the US would be doing the world a favour by keeping its troops there.

The trouble is that it does not. As US frustration with the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki reveals, the Iraqi government is a government in name only.

It can offer its citizens a reasonable guarantee of security only behind US blast walls in Baghdad's "Green Zone". Elsewhere Iraqis cannot go to work, to the markets or to school without fear of being blown-up, kidnapped or shot.

Mr Bush's February troop "surge" is credited with reducing the violence in recent months but it is an unsustainable initiative that must taper off in April when the extra troops reach the end of their 15-month tour of duty.

Nothing that has occurred so far suggests the Iraqi government or Iraqi troops, many of whom are suspected of moonlighting as Shi'ite insurgents, will be able to fill the gaps.

The US' attempt to bring democracy to Iraq has been a misconceived venture from start to finish. Waged on false grounds, poorly planned, poorly executed and inadequately resourced, it has achieved the exact opposite of what Washington DC's hawks promised....