IN AN impassioned plea to America to hold its nerve, President Bush said yesterday that Islamic radicals were trying to take control of Iraq as part of a plan to “enslave whole nations and intimidate the world”.

Facing dwindling support for the Iraq war and growing calls for a troop withdrawal, Mr Bush said that terrorists had made Iraq the central front “in their war on humanity”, and that defeat for the United States would be a catastrophic setback in the broader War on Terror.

He compared the “evil ideology of Islamic radicals” with the threats of communism and fascism in the 20th century. “The militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region and establish a radical Islamic empire that expands from Spain to Indonesia,” he said.

Using some of the most emotive language since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the President sought to rally the country behind an increasingly unpopular war by claiming that defeat in Iraq could spell disaster for the US.

“The terrorists would be able to advance their stated agenda: to develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate Europe, to assault the American people and to blackmail our Government into isolation,” he said.

With nearly 2,000 US soldiers killed in Iraq, and his war policy facing a crucial test in Iraq’s referendum on a new constitution on October 15, Mr Bush said: “The terrorists are as brutal an enemy as we have ever faced. This war will require more sacrifice, more time and more resolve.” But declaring that America would never retreat, and in a call to arms to his countrymen, Mr Bush said: “We will keep our nerve and we will win that victory.”

Mr Bush, who rarely mentions Osama bin Laden by name, referred in his speech to the al-Qaeda leader three times, and made frequent reference to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist leading the Iraqi insurgency.

Comparing bin Laden and al-Zarqawi with Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot, he said: “Other fanatics have consumed whole nations in war and genocide before leaving the stage of history. Evil men obsessed with ambition and unburdened by conscience must be taken very seriously, and we must stop them before their crimes can multiply.”

Mr Bush sought to highlight that most of the radicals’ victims were Muslims. Part of his strategy included a rare attempt to ridicule bin Laden’s privileged upbringing.

He said that the wealthy bin Laden told poor Muslims that the road to paradise for them was to become suicide bombers, “though he never offers to go along for the ride”.

Taking on critics who say that invading Iraq has fuelled radicalism, Mr Bush reminded his audience at the National Endowment for Democracy, a Washington-based think-tank, that US troops were not in Iraq on September 11, 2001. The extremists have used a “litany of excuses” for violence, even including “the Crusades of a thousand years ago”.

“No act of ours invited the rage of the killers, and no concession, bribe or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder,” he said.

Referring to the murder of children, the bombing of mosques and those that “cut the throat of a bound captive”, Mr Bush said that Islamic radicals were displaying the same “shameless cruelty and heartless zealotry” witnessed in the Soviet gulags, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the killing fields of Cambodia.

But in a reminder of how difficult it was proving to win the hearts and minds of Muslims, the US Senate defied the White House and voted on Wednesday night to set new limits on interrogating detainees, a response to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Despite Mr Bush’s opposition, 46 of the Senate’s 55 Republicans backed the initiative, introduced by John McCain, a former Vietnam prisoner of war.

Mr Bush gave an explicit warning to Iran and Syria, calling them the terrorists’ “allies of convenience”. America, he said, made “no distinction between those who commit acts of terror and those who support or harbour them because they’re equally guilty of murder”.

The President also said that the militants are aided by elements of the Arab news media, “that incite hatred and anti-Semitism”. He referred to the militants’ use of internet technology, saying that “faraway training camps” are no longer required. Now, Mr Bush said, they can access online training libraries to learn how to build a roadside bomb.

WHITE HOUSE, GOD AND WAR

The White House has denied that President Bush said that he was instructed by God to invade Iraq and Afghanistan.

Nabil Shaath, a former Palestinian Foreign Minister, said that he had heard Mr Bush say so during an interview for a documentary.

He said that in June 2003 he heard Mr Bush tell Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Prime Minister: “God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan’, and I did, and then God would tell me, ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’, and I did.”

An official for the Bush Administration said: “This account is false.”

• Israel and the Arabs: Elusive Peace, will be shown on BBC 2 on October 10, 17 and 24

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