George Bush on Wednesday staked his presidency on winning a ”complete victory” in Iraq, rejecting a timetable for withdrawal and setting a high bar for military success.
In a speech to the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, the president claimed substantial progress in training Iraqi forces, offering the prospect of US redeployment outside Iraq’s lethal cities and eventual force reductions.
But Bush made it clear that there could be no wholesale withdrawal before the insurgency was comprehensively defeated and stability was restored to Iraq.
”Pulling our troops out before they achieve their purpose is not a plan for victory,” Bush said on Wednesday. ”To all who wear the uniform, I make you this pledge: America will not run in the face of car bombers and assassins so long as I am your commander-in-chief.”
As with most of his recent speeches, Bush was addressing men and women in uniform — an arena full of naval cadets. Recent polls suggest that more than 60% of Americans now believe the war in Iraq is not worth its cost to the nation.
In an attempt to force back that tide in public opinion, a series of presidential speeches is planned before the December 15 elections in Iraq. Wednesday’s address, the first in the series, coincided with the publication of a 35-page statement of war aims, entitled: ”National Strategy for Victory in Iraq”, aimed at bolstering public morale and beating back the political pressure for a withdrawal.
That pressure increased on Wednesday when the Democrats’ leader in the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi declared her formal support for a plan to withdraw US forces over six months, beginning immediately. That plan was first advanced by an influential Democratic hawk, John Murtha, in a declaration that took Washington by surprise.
The president rejected a slew of recent reports questioning the readiness of Iraqi forces, claiming they had made substantial progress and had taken over significant areas of the country.
The president claimed there were now 80 Iraqi battalions fighting alongside coalition forces and 40 others ”taking the lead in the fight”.
A Pentagon assessment in September said only one Iraqi battalion was capable of mounting major operations without support, but the president insisted that was too harsh a standard by which to measure progress. ”As a matter of fact, there are some battalions from Nato militaries that would not be able to meet this standard,” he said.
As Iraqi forces improved, the president predicted, US troops would be redeployed, moving out of cities, making fewer patrols and focusing on special counter-terrorist operations.
While Iraqi forces would ultimately take over from US troops, allowing them to return home, the president insisted the pace ”will be driven by the conditions on the ground in Iraq and the good judgement of our commanders, not by artificial timetables set by politicians in Washington.”
Bush went out of his way to set a high standard for declaring victory in Iraq declaring: ”We will never give in, and we will never accept anything less than complete victory.”
The national strategy document stipulated that such a complete victory required leaving behind a country that was ”peaceful, united, stable, and secure, well integrated into the international community, and a full partner in the global war on terrorism”.
”Failure is not an option,” the document declares, as this would leave Iraq as ”a safe haven from which terrorists could plan attacks against America”.
Democratic politicians dismissed the speech as a repeat of old rhetoric. Senator John Kerry said the president was ignoring what his own generals are telling him: ”That the large presence of American forces on the ground that feeds the insurgency”.
Steve Clemons, director of the American Strategy Programme at the New America Foundation, a Washington thinktank, said Bush’s war aims failed to address the strains on US armed forces imposed by Iraq.
”It’s a very expansive commitment and it blows by the structural questions,” Clemons said. He added that those problems could only be resolved by a withdrawal, changing the current rules limiting the frequency of combat tours for individual units, or by moving towards a draft. He said Bush was trying to escape those problems by portraying Iraqi forces as more ready than they actually are. – Guardian Unlimited Â