President George Bush on Monday warned it was too early for United States troops to “pack up and go home” from Iraq, on the fourth anniversary of a war clouded by pessimism and political angst on the home front.
Bush also said in a televised address from the White House, after speaking to Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, that his new US plan to pacify Iraq would take months to show results.
“It could be tempting to look at the challenges in Iraq and conclude our best option is to pack up and go home,” Bush said, four years to the day after American troops launched operations to depose Saddam Hussein.
“That may be satisfying in the short run, but I believe the consequences for American security would be devastating,” Bush said, warning that a US departure would spark chaos in Iraq, which would engulf the region.
“The terrorists could emerge from the chaos with a safe haven in Iraq to replace the one they had in Afghanistan, which they used to plan the attacks of September 11 2001,” Bush said.
A new US-led Baghdad security effort that will see 21Â 500 extra troops pour into Iraq will not yield immediate success, Bush warned, as the unpopular war entered its fifth year.
“The Baghdad security plan is still in its early stages and success will take months, not days or weeks,” Bush said in an eight-minute statement from the White House’s Roosevelt Room, which broke into regular programming on US television networks and was also carried by cable news channels.
Bush also paid tribute to US soldiers and argued that despite still raging on, the Iraq war had yielded considerable progress.
“Today the world is rid of Saddam Hussein and a tyrant has been held to account for his crimes,” Bush said.
“Nearly 12-million Iraqis voted in free elections under a democratic Constitution that they wrote for themselves. And the democratic leaders are now working to build a free society that upholds the rule of law.”
“We also hold in our hearts the good men and women who have given their lives in this struggle. We pray for the loved ones they have left behind.”
Despite Bush’s warnings, a new poll on Monday showed already sceptical US public opinion on Iraq had soured further, with only 32% of Americans saying they favoured the war, compared with 72% just after it began.
Nearly half of those questioned in the survey by Opinion Research Corporation for CNN said they strongly opposed the war. Four years ago only one in five said they were strongly against it.
And despite recent claims by the Bush administration and top generals that the month-old US troop surge was beginning to work, another poll told a story of Iraq scepticism.
Only 18% of those polled had confidence in US and coalition troops, while 78% opposed their presence, 69% said their presence made security worse and 51% said attacks on coalition forces were justified.
The poll, commissioned by the BBC, ABC News and ARD German TV contrasted with a similar survey two years ago when two-thirds of Iraqis were more upbeat.
But in a British television interview Maliki, who spoke to Bush on Monday in a secure videoconference, insisted sectarian killing had ended and blamed violence on al-Qaeda, which he called “the biggest threat” to Iraq.
Leaders of the Democratic majority in Congress were, meanwhile, gathering for another week of bombarding Bush with political attacks over the war.
By midweek, the House of Representatives was due to debate Bush’s $124-billion funding request for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Democrats last week inserted a clause calling for the withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq by September 2008 at the latest, but Bush has vowed to veto any such legislation if it makes it to his desk.
The Senate last week voted down a similar attempt by the Democratic leadership intended to bring troops home by the end of March next year.
In Iraq on Monday, a string of coordinated car bombs and mortar attacks killed 15 people and wounded dozens more in the ethnically volatile oil hub of Kirkuk.
Another eight people were killed in violence elsewhere.
Anti-war demonstrators planned to hold at least a thousand candlelight vigils around the US. — AFP