Personally, I think Bush walked into the admission because he didn’t know the historiacal significance of the Tet offensive, and just thought Stephanopoulos was talking about combat in general. IMNSHO, Iraq turned into Vietnam the moment we went in without any real plans to get out.

President Bush said in a one-on-one interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos that a newspaper column comparing the current fighting in Iraq to the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, which was widely seen as the turning point in that war, might be accurate.

Stephanopoulos asked whether the president agreed with the opinion of columnist Tom Friedman, who wrote in The New York Times today that the situation in Iraq may be equivalent to the Tet offensive in Vietnam almost 40 years ago.

“He could be right,” the president said, before adding, “There’s certainly a stepped-up level of violence, and we’re heading into an election.”

“George, my gut tells me that they have all along been trying to inflict enough damage that we’d leave,” Bush said. “And the leaders of al Qaeda have made that very clear. Look, here’s how I view it. First of all, al Qaeda is still very active in Iraq. They are dangerous. They are lethal. They are trying to not only kill American troops, but they’re trying to foment sectarian violence.”

The problem is that al Qaeda wasn’t in Iraq before we created the environment to welcome them.

On a related note, here’s an excellent analysis by Kieth Olbermann at MSNBC.com on the recent “anti-terror” legislation signed into law by Bush suspending habeas Corpus for people he doesn’t like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RhmCKKt8h4.

The really sad part is that we still have two years of this before we can even begin the clean-up.