London, UK, August 23, 2007 – President Bush’s invoking of Vietnam – one of the biggest military disasters in US history – in support of keeping troops in Iraq, betrays desperation in attempting to justify a continued military presence in occupied Iraq.

In the speech to army veterans in Kansas City yesterday, President Bush said "One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America’s withdrawal 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’." He went on to hail the US military machine as the "The greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known".

Dr Imran Waheed, media representative of Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain, said, "Invoking Vietnam is not merely an act of desperation but overlooks the facts of what his ‘force for human liberation’ has already achieved. "

"Bush recalls the millions of innocent Vietnamese who became ‘boat people’, and those who died in the ‘killing fields’ of Vietnam and Cambodia following the withdrawal of US forces, but seems to have forgotten the 2.2 million Iraqi ‘boat people’ forced into exile in Syria and Jordan. The invasion and occupation led by the US and British governments have produced their own ‘killing fields’ in Iraq, where over 650,000 civilians have lost their lives."

"His description of the US military machine as ‘the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known’ is only accurate in the sense that they have liberated the innocent civilians of Fallujah, Haditha, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and elsewhere in Iraq and Afghanistan of their security, dignity, property and their lives. In reality it is the presence of occupying forces that produce the violence, given that even the Pentagon’s report revealed that more than 60 per cent of the current attacks target these forces."

"The initial neo-con reasoning of bringing ‘freedom and democracy’ to the Muslim world was no more than a supremacist argument for forcibly changing people’s values. Now, remaining in Iraq – under pretext of the ‘war on terror’ – is simply about salvaging age-old colonial interests and resources."

"For our part Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain will continue to rally people, Muslim and non-Muslim, to continue their calls for a withdrawal of all foreign troops from the region and an end to the interference of western governments around the world – including their support for the tyrannical regimes in Muslim countries. We will continue to expose the propaganda of capitalist-style ‘human liberation’ that is nothing more than the enslavement of humans to big business interests, and explain why it is that Muslims favour an Islamic system (the Caliphate) that does not allow itself to be hijacked by such a corporate oligarchy."

[Ends]

Notes to Editors:

Download Hizb ut-Tahrir Britain’s report Iraq: A New Way Forward