Posted on 08/30/2006 4:54:05 PM PDT by Aussie Dasher
FOR the third time in less than a year, and two months before crucial US elections, President George W. Bush is launching a new campaign to counter opposition to the Iraq war with a series of speeches he insists are not political.
Mr Bush will kick off the speeches with an appearance tomorrow at the American Legion annual convention in Salt Lake City and will maintain the theme of the Iraq war and national security throughout September.
Amid a sharp escalation of violence in Iraq over the past few months, Mr Bush will acknowledge "that these are unsettling times", White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said.
But he will discuss the Iraq war in the broader context of the war on terror, she said.
The speeches coincide with the commemoration of the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.
While Democrats have pressed for a timeline for withdrawing US troops from Iraq, Mr Bush and his aides have argued that a sudden pullout would embolden al-Qaeda and other militant groups and leave Americans more vulnerable to another terrorist attack on US soil.
Mr Bush, who was in Little Rock, Arkansas, for a fund-raiser, said his speech series was about policy, not politics.
"My series of speeches, they are not political speeches, they are speeches about the future of this country and they are speeches to make it clear that if we retreat before the job is done, this nation will become in even more jeopardy," Mr Bush said. "These are important times and I would seriously hope people wouldn't politicise these issues that I am going to talk about."
Laying the groundwork for the administration's new push on Iraq, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld today compared war critics to those who argued for appeasing the Nazis during World War II.
Mr Rumsfeld made the controversial comments at the same American Legion venue where Mr Bush is to speak tomorrow.
While Mr Bush's approval ratings have been sliding over the past year and are at less than 40 per cent, surveys show voters have given him his highest marks yet on the issue of the war on terror.
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