President George W Bush this week tried to stifle rising doubts on the occupation of Iraq by insisting this week’s bombings were a sign that life had improved under the United States’s watch.
With comparisons being made between the official justification for war in Vietnam and the administration’s media strategy in Iraq, the US president made a point of seeing reporters at the White House after a meeting with the chief US administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer.
The appearance was in line with a new policy of speaking out to promote a more ”balanced” picture on Iraq.
Bush dismissed the notion that the rising violence could jeopardise efforts to rebuild Iraq, saying the bombings were the work of militants driven to desperation by the US’s success.
”The more progress we make on the ground, the more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity is available, the more jobs are available, the more kids that are going to school, the more desperate these killers become, because they can’t stand the thought of a free society,” Bush said.
He added that Washington had no intention of quitting Iraq and he was confident the population would be won over by democratic ideals. ”The best hope for the coalition is that ordinary Iraqis will see a better path in elections and reconstruction,” he said.
Bush’s assertions follow a peculiar logic deployed by administration officials in recent days that dismisses the violence as blips on a graph of slow but steady progress. ”We’ll have rough days … but the overall thrust is in the right direction and the good days outnumber the bad days,” Bremer said.
However, with Congress balking at the $87-billion bill for Iraqi reconstruction, and growing resentment within Republican ranks aimed at the prime mover of Washington’s Iraq policy, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Bush had a difficult task this week to persuade Americans that all was well.
Republican Senator John McCain told Newsweek magazine that it was time the Bush administration faced up in public to its problems. — Â