US President George W. Bush invoked the Vietnam War on Wednesday to argue against withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, warning that if the US pulls its troops out of Iraq, "the terrorists would be emboldened."

"If we were to abandon the Iraqi people, the terrorists would be emboldened, and use their victory to gain new recruits," Bush said in a speech to members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, at their convention in Kansas City, Missouri.

"The tragedy of Vietnam is too large to be contained in one speech," he said.

Bush said that three decades after Washington withdrew from Vietnam, there was a debate about how the country had got into the Vietnam War and how it had left it.

"Whatever your position is on that debate, 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 noted.

Bush said that a terrorist safe haven on the other side of the world could bring death and destruction to the streets of US cities, as demonstrated by the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

He said that unlike in Vietnam, if the US withdrew its troops from Iraq "before the job is done," the enemy "will follow us home."

"And that is why, for the security of the United States of America, we must defeat them overseas so we do not face them in the United States of America," he said.

Democrats have pushed for withdrawing American troops from Iraq, but Bush has asked members of Congress and the public to withhold judgment on his troop "surge" in Iraq until an assessment report on Iraq is submitted in September.

A recent poll released by CNN showed that 64 percent Americans now oppose the Iraq war.

(Xinhua News Agency August 23, 2007)