ARAB-US RELATIONS - Aug 22 - Bush Warns Of Iraqi 'Killing Fields'.

George W. Bush on says the consequences of a US withdrawal from Iraq can echo the "killing fields" genocide that destroyed Cambodia after the US pulled out from Vietnam in the mid-1970s. In a speech signalling Bush is in no mood to compromise with his Iraq war critics, the US president threw down the gauntlet in advance of Democratic plans next month to revive a congressional vote setting a deadline for withdrawal of most of the 160,000 US troops in Iraq. Much of Bush's speech, which was delivered in Kansas City to the US Veterans of Foreign Wars, focused on the history of the US occupation of Japan and Germany after the second world war and on the aftermath of the US military pull-out from Indochina. "The price of America's withdrawal from Vietnam was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like "boat people", "re-education camps" and "killing fields", Bush said. "Iraq is a central front in the war on terror. Withdrawal without getting the job done would be a disaster". The US president, who appeared to be in ebullient spirits, also reprised his controversial linking of democracy to religious values. "We are still in the early hours of the current ideological struggle", he said. "Our world will never be safe until the people of the Middle East know the freedom that our Creator intended for all". Aug 22 speech, which offered a strong echo of the neoconservative agenda that characterised Bush's first term, was greeted with derision by many of Bush's critics. In a statement, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential frontrunner, said: We need to stop refereeing the war and start getting out now". Anthony Cordesman, a leading Iraq analyst at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said: Bush preaches to the choir without noticing that the choir is getting smaller every time. The American people needed to hear about prospects on the ground in Iraq. Instead we got a history lesson that would have embarrassed a first year undergraduate". Lawrence Korb, a Vietnam war veteran and now senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, said: If President Bush had served in Vietnam he would have been more cautious about expecting we would be greeted as liberators in Iraq. Had we remained bogged down in Vietnam when there was no military solution we would not have been able to win the Cold War". Bush's speech comes less than a month before David Petraeus, the US general in charge in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador in Baghdad, report to Congress on the progress achieved by the "new way forward in Iraq" that Bush unveiled in January. Bush has argued for more time to assess the progress of the 30,000 troop "surge" that was only completed in mid-June. But a growing number of Republican lawmakers, most of whose seats are vulnerable in next year's elections, have expressed impatience with the slow pace of political reform in Baghdad. On Aug 22, Freedom Watch, a Republican group that is run by Ari Fleischer, who was Bush's first presidential spokesman, launched a $15m television campaign focused on the districts of Republican and Democratic lawmakers who are wavering. Its targets, which include moderate Republican senators, such as Olympia Snowe of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, are mostly the same as those targeted by a $12m media campaign by Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, an anti-war group. "These ads are squeezing from the right the very same Republicans who are feeling the heat from their constituents back home for their support for Bush's failed war policy", said Moira Mack, spokeswoman for the group.