President George Bush yesterday launched the latest salvo in a White House public relations offensive to convince Americans that things are going well in Iraq.
In his weekly radio address to the nation, Bush said Iraq was ‘making progress’ despite a steady stream of bad news on front pages.
Bush and top administration officials are trying to reach out directly to public opinion and break through ‘the filter’ of a mainstream media that they accuse of concentrating on casualty figures and Iraqi resistance.
Bush said Iraq was a country where the markets are busy, shelves are full of previously banned goods, oil is flowing and a vibrant independent media has replaced Saddam’s state-controlled papers and television stations.
He also addressed the main domestic political concern of rebuilding Iraq: the $87-billion spending request before Congress. The request, Bush said, should be passed soon ‘so this vital work can proceed’.
With a presidential election 13 months away, Iraq has become a powerful tool for the Democrats to beat Bush with, citing the daily deaths of American GIs and the huge costs. Bush’s approval rating has dipped to 49%, the lowest of his presidency.
‘The President did not plan well for winning the peace and rebuilding the nation,’ said Democratic Congressman Baron Hill after Bush’s latest pronouncement.
The administration is taking the ‘good news in Iraq’ message out into small-town America. A series of speeches and interviews for Bush and top aides has been planned for this week with local newspapers and small television stations.
The strategy is reminiscent of President Bill Clinton, who also sought to bypass the Washington press corps at times of crisis.
Speaking twice last week in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Bush tried to hammer out the simple message that Iraq was a better place with Saddam gone. ‘There’s only one decent and humane reaction to the fall of Saddam Hussein: good riddance,’ he told the New Hampshire National Guard.
This was followed on a trip to Chicago by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who said America and the world were safer now. Though no weapons of mass destruction have been found, Rice said Saddam could one day have provided chemical or biological weapons ‘to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 – and that terrible prospect could not be put aside’.
On Friday, Vice President Dick Cheney gave the strongest defence yet of the war on terror. Terrorists were still doing ‘everything they can’ to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill thousands of Americans ‘in a single day of horror’.
The speech, to the conservative Heritage Foundation, defended the invasion of Iraq.
‘As long as George W. Bush is President of the United States, this country will not permit gathering threats to become certain tragedies,’ Cheney said.
Despite the aggressive spin, the administration faces an uphill battle to convince an American public growing increasingly sceptical of the reasons for war and increasingly angry at the costs.
The situation on the ground in Iraq is an awkward mosaic of political and economic progress with deadly violence and high crime. Electricity is now flowing through the entire country and schools have reopened. But hostility towards American troops is growing with scores of attacks each week.
On Friday a spasm of violence shook Baghdad and saw two US soldiers killed in a Shia suburb, a Spanish military attache shot in his home and a car bomb detonated in a police station, killing 10 people.
Yesterday an explosion ripped open an oil pipeline north west of Kirkuk. ‘There was an explosion, sabotage,’ said Ghazi al-Talibani, a worker for the North Oil company, which operates the pipeline and oilfields around the northern Iraqi city.
Meanwhile, US soldiers stormed three houses near Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit and detained four suspects, two believed to be linked to the ousted leader’s special security force.