Martinsburg, W.Va. – President Bush equated the war in Iraq on Wednesday with the U.S. war for independence. Like those revolutionaries who “dropped their pitchforks and picked up their muskets to fight for liberty,” Bush said American soldiers were also fighting “a new and unprecedented war” to protect U.S. freedom.
In a reprise of speeches he delivered throughout the 2006 congressional campaign, the president said the threat that emerged Sept. 11, 2001, remains and that “a major enemy in Iraq is the same enemy that dared attack the United States on that fateful day.”
The president was adamant in his Fourth of July message that he would stand up to calls to end the war before he believes it has been won. When Congress returns next week, Democrats plan to renew their legislative push to bring home troops.
Addresses National Guard
“Withdrawing our troops prematurely based on politics, not on the advice and recommendation of our military commanders, would not be in our national interest. It would hand the enemy a victory and put America’s security at risk – and that’s something we’re not going to do,” he said.
Bush delivered a 28-minute holiday speech to the 167th Airlift Wing of the West Virginia National Guard, a unit that has sent troops to Afghanistan and Iraq – some for second and third deployments. The president spent as much time shaking hands as he did delivering his address to an audience that included Guard family members and other residents in the northeastern corner of the state.
West Virginia is a once-reliably Democratic state that for the past two presidential elections has been central to Bush’s victories, and Wednesday marked the fourth Independence Day he has visited the state since taking office.
But even here, where he won repeated rounds of applause in a gigantic hangar just completed for a new detachment of C-5 Galaxy cargo jets, there were hundreds of empty seats behind a towering American flag.
Offering a history lesson on the 231st anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Bush said, “We were a small band of freedom-loving patriots taking on the most powerful empire in the world.”
It was not his intent, of course, to evoke a comparison with the Iraq war, but some Iraqis who oppose the continued presence of U.S. troops in their country have made similar arguments.
“Your service is needed”
In an echo of his own warnings that the fight against terrorism will last years, Bush said that, at the start of the fight for independence, “America’s victory was far from certain. … Citizens had to struggle for six more years to finally determine the outcome of the Revolutionary War.”
Finding a common theme in the nation’s first war and its latest one, Bush said that, although the weapons and enemies have changed, the patriotism of U.S. soldiers – and of the civilian soldiers of National Guard units – remained the same.
“Your service is needed,” he said, in a pitch for enlistments. “We need for people to volunteer to defend America.”
Bush planned to mark the rest of the holiday at the White House, which offers a spectacular view of fireworks over the Washington Monument, and to celebrate his 61st birthday two days early.
He said his wife, Laura, would have joined him for his speech, “but I told her to fire up the grill.”
“Don’t tell her I said that,” he added.
