Revolutionary War ideals at work in Iraq, Bush says

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 on Sept. 11, 2001, remained today and “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 push to bring home the troops.

“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,” Bush said.

He 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, perspiration darkening the back of his olive-drab shirt, as he did delivering his address to an audience that included family members and other residents in the northeastern corner of the state.

West Virginia is a once-reliably Democratic state that for the last 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 planes, 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 from Britain, 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 to evoke a comparison to the Iraq war, but some Iraqis who oppose the continued presence of U.S. troops in their country have made similar arguments. 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 had 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’s short trip by helicopter from the White House to Martinsburg broke up what is a week being spent largely out of the public eye.

The president returned to Washington on Monday after a five-day visit to his parents’ house in Kennebunkport, Maine, where he met with Russian President Vladimir V. Putin. He is scheduled to go to Camp David, Md., on Friday. Bush planned to mark the rest of the holiday at the White House, which offers a spectacular view of the 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.

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james.gerstenzang@latimes.com