Bush launches PR campaign to bolster failing support for Iraq war
President Bush said Thursday that withdrawing now from Iraq would leave Americans at risk of terrorist attacks “in the streets of our own cities.”
“The war we fight today is more than a military conflict,’’ Mr. Bush said in a speech to veterans at an American Legion convention here. “It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century.’’
The speech, the first of five addresses on national security Mr. Bush plans to deliver between now and Sept. 19, was part of an orchestrated White House offensive to buttress public support for the Iraq war and portray Democrats as less capable of protecting the country, a theme that has proved effective for Republicans in the past two elections.
The latest White House offensive — the third major public relations effort in the past year to offset a decline in public support for the Iraq war and place it in the context of a broader cause — began unfolding this week, with combative speeches to veterans groups by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. Both invoked variations of the word “appease’’ to characterize critics of the president’s policies, with Mr. Rumsfeld saying they had not “learned history’s lessons.’’
That language drew an immediate backlash from Democrats on Wednesday, and Mr. Bush did not adopt it. But he did echo the allusions to the failed strategy of trying to appease Nazi Germany. He called today’s terrorists ‘’successors to Fascists, to Nazis, to Communists and other totalitarians of the 20th century,’’ and cautioned Americans against concluding that five years after the Sept. 11 attacks the threat had receded.
“That feeling,’’ he said, “is natural and comforting — and wrong.’’
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