Dean made his comments in an interview on WOAI Radio in San Antonio.
Click here to listen to the complete interview.
GOP Chair Mehlman Responds...
"I've seen this before in my life. This is the same situation we had in Vietnam. Everybody then kept saying, 'just another year, just stay the course, we'll have a victory.' Well, we didn't have a victory, and this policy cost the lives of an additional 25,000 troops because we were too stubborn to recognize what was happening."
Dean says the Democrat position on the war is 'coalescing,' and is likely to include several proposals.
"I think we need a strategic redeployment over a period of two years," Dean said. "Bring the 80,000 National Guard and Reserve troops home immediately. They don't belong in a conflict like this anyway. We ought to have a redeployment to Afghanistan of 20,000 troops, we don't have enough troops to do the job there and its a place where we are welcome. And we need a force in the Middle East, not in Iraq but in a friendly neighboring country to fight (terrorist leader Musab) Zarqawi, who came to Iraq after this invasion. We've got to get the target off the backs of American troops.
Dean didn't specify which country the US forces would deploy to, but he said he would like to see the entire process completed within two years. He said the Democrat proposal is not a 'withdrawal,' but rather a 'strategic redeployment' of U.S. forces.
"The White House wants us to have a permanent commitment to Iraq. This is an Iraqi problem. President Bush got rid of Saddam Hussein and that was a great thing, but that could have been done in a very different way. But now that we're there we need to figure out how to leave. 80% of Iraqis want us to leave, and it's their country."
Dean also compared the controversy over pre-war intelligence to the Watergate scandal which brought down Richard Nixon's presidency in 1974.
"What we see today is very much like what was going in Watergate," Dean said. "It turns out there is a lot of good evidence that President Bush did not tell the truth when he was asking Congress for the power to go to war. The President said last week that Congress saw the same intelligence that he did in making the decision to go to war, and that is flat out wrong. The President withheld some intelligence from the Senate Intelligence Committee. He withheld the report from the CIA that in fact there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction (in Iraq), that they did not have a nuclear program. They (the White House) selectively gave intelligence to the United States Senate and the United States Congress and got them to give the go ahead to attack these people."
Howard Dean ha comparado al gobierno de George W. Bush con el gobierno de Richard Nixon y la guerra de Iraq con la guerra de Vietnam y ha dejado saber a la opinión que no cree que Estados Unidos vaya a ganar en la ocupación a Iraq. En sus propias palabras, Dean dijo que "''la idea de que vamos a ganar la guerra en Iraq es una idea simple y llanamente equivocada''".

Dean ha denunciado que, de la misma manera en que Nixon manipuló la información de inteligencia para justificar la guerra de Vietnam, Bush hizo lo propio en Iraq y ha resaltado que se está repitiendo la historia al citar frases de Bush que se asemejan a las frases de Nixon en Vietnam como ''"permanecer en el rumbo"'', ''"hasta la victoria"'', etc.