In the face of mounting casualties and a growing threat of civil war in Iraq, George Bush on Saturday urged Americans to stay the course and insisted that he had a plan for eventual victory.
In his weekly radio address, the president said: ”Our country has been tested before and we have a long history of resolve and faith in the cause of freedom. Now we will see that cause to victory in Iraq.”
His comments will do little to ease a growing sense of crisis in Washington as images from the carnage in Iraq continue to flood America’s television screens and Bush’s poll numbers on the war spiral down. American casualties have now risen above 1 700 in the conflict.
The latest casualties came as a suicide bomber in Fallujah struck a vehicle carrying a number of US women soldiers, killing at least three female marines, and injuring a dozen more. The women’s deaths marked the bloodiest day in Iraq so far for America’s female soldiers and came amid further attacks on Iraqi security forces which left 10 policemen in Samarra and six bystanders dead in a suicide bombing at a police officer’s home in Baghdad.
The seemingly endless flow of bad news has sparked deep unease among many Republicans with an eye on tough mid-term elections next year. It has also opened up an apparent gap between senior White House officials and the army. Both Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney made aggressive statements saying that the war was on track and the insurgency was being defeated. However, senior generals, including John Abizaid, commander of US forces in the Middle East, paint a much less rosy picture.
Such developments have emboldened Democrats to go on a fierce offensive. In a response to Bush’s radio address, Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser under Jimmy Carter, slammed the president for turning Iraq into a training ground for terrorists. He said the war had been conducted with ”tactical and strategic incompetence” and made the United States less safe.
”America finds itself more isolated than ever, the object of unprecedented international mistrust,” Brzezinski said. ”We are not as safe as we should be here at home.”
He also used one of the most Vietnam-era words in American politics, when he said Iraq was threatening to become a ”quagmire”.
But Bush’s speech betrayed no sense of any shift in policy. It also probably presaged much of what he will say when he addresses the American people in a special prime-time speech on Tuesday that will focus on Iraq.
Bush insisted that Iraq had made ”dramatic progress” and praised elections held this year, but did admit that tough times lay ahead: ”We can expect more tough fighting … yet I am confident in the outcome. A democratic Iraq will be a great triumph in the history of liberty.”
Bush said America remained fully committed to fighting the war and was pursuing a two-track military and political strategy to defeat the Iraqi insurgents.
”Our military strategy is clear. We will train Iraqi security forces so they can defend their freedom and protect their people, then our troops will return home with the honour they have earned. The political track of our strategy is to continue helping Iraqis build the institutions of a stable democracy.” That marks no change in direction in America’s hopes to begin to withdraw only when Iraqi forces are seen as capable of replacing them. It also comes a day after Bush hosted Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and rejected any calls for a timetable for pulling out US troops.
Reaction among the American media was notably withering on Bush’s performance with al-Jaafari and the President’s insistence that America was making progress in Iraq. ‘If the war is going according to plan, someone needs to rethink the plan,’ said the New York Times. – Guardian Unlimited Â