On the fifth anniversary of the speech, the mission remains unaccomplished and even the White House is suggesting Bush never said it was.

"Five years after President Bush's 'Mission Accomplished' speech about Iraq, America's twin wars are looking more like 'Mission: Impossible,'," The Daily News commented Thursday.

Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 on claims of stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and links to Al-Qaeda, both claimed later proved ungrounded.

On May 1, Bush landed in a Navy jet on carrier Abraham Lincoln, which has just concluded an Iraq war duty.
 
 
"Major combat operations in Iraq have ended," Bush said with a "Mission Accomplished" banner prominently displayed in the background.

But five years to that day, Iraq remains embroiled in an endless cycle of violence with a car bomb exploding in central Baghdad and killing at least eight people and wounding 21 others.

A few hours earlier, a US soldier was killed in a blast during a patrol in northern Iraq's Nineveh province bringing to 4,062 the number of American troops killed in Iraq since the invasion.

With 50 fatalities April became the deadliest month for the US military since September 2007, when at least 65 soldiers were killed.

What Mission

Anti-war activists are planning to unveil a 50-foot replica of the "Mission Accomplished" banner in front of the White House to mark the anniversary.

"It is amazing that five years after saying Mission Accomplished, we now don't even know what our mission is in Iraq, or how to accomplish it," Iraq War veteran Jon Soltz, chairman of VoteVets.org, told the Chicago Tribune.

"There are still no metrics, there is no diplomatic surge, there is no political strategy to deal with Muqtada al-Sadr, and no road to home for our troops".

The White House tried to defend the fallout suggesting the banner only referred to the end of the carrier's 10-month deployment, not the Iraq mission.

"President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said mission accomplished for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission," his spokeswoman Dana Perino said on Wednesday, April 30.

"We have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner."

In 2006, then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he had edited out Bush's speech, which included the "mission accomplished" phrase.

"I took 'mission accomplished' out," he said in an interview with veteran journalist Bob Woodward.

"I was in Baghdad, and I was given a draft of that thing to look at. And I just died, and I said 'my God, it's too conclusive'. And I fixed it and sent it back…and they fixed the speech, but not the sign."

A month later, Bush used the "mission accomplished" phrase in a speech to US soldiers at Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar

"America sent you on a mission to remove a grave threat and to liberate an oppressed people, and that mission has been accomplished."

HEYET Net- IslamOnline