ANNAPOLIS, Md. – Acknowledging some missteps and setbacks in Iraq, President Bush vowed Wednesday to press on until the country is no longer a “safe haven” for insurgency.
Bush spoke at length of what he called solid progress toward democracy throughout the war-torn country. And he laid out publicly the administration’s two-year-old “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.” But he offered no timetable to begin withdrawing the 160,000 U.S. troops now in Iraq, even declaring he’d send more if his military commanders needed them.
“Pulling our troops out before they’ve achieved their purpose is not a plan for victory,” the president declared at the U.S. Naval Academy.
Training Iraqi troops hasn’t always “gone smoothly,” Bush said, allowing later: “We’ve faced some setbacks in standing up a capable Iraqi security.”
But he said that as Iraqi forces become more capable, U.S. forces will pull back into less-sweeping, more targeted specialized operations, moving out of Iraqi cities and conducting fewer patrols and convoys.
As Iraqi troops gain experience and a permanent Iraqi government settles in – the next elections are Dec. 15 – Bush said: “We will be able to decrease our troop levels in Iraq without losing our capability to defeat the terrorists.”
The president, however, set no time for starting such a drawdown, nor did he indicate how many troops might leave, or how many might stay, or for how long. And his 45-minute speech and accompanying 35-page strategy paper did little to quell his Democratic congressional critics or curtail the flow of e-mail from detractors and supporters alike in what has evolved into full-scale, campaign-style national debate over the war.
“The president failed to answer the questions that all Americans are asking,” said Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I. “How do we know if progress is being made there? How do we measure success? How much longer should America expect to be in Iraq?”
Sen. John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who ran unsuccessfully against Bush last year, acknowledged that the president spoke of reducing the U.S. presence in Iraqi cities and breaking down the insurgency “as he never has before.”
But Kerry concluded that Bush addressed those issues only after his critics had long prodded him to speak out.
And Kerry said the president ducked the “fundamental issue” that it is “the large presence of American forces on the ground that feeds the insurgency and makes it more difficult for the Iraqis to assume responsibility because they don’t have to.” “Our own generals are telling the president that our presence in large numbers is part of the problem and that you have to begin to reduce that,” Kerry said.
The president – who has slumped to new lows in public opinion polls, in part because of the war – launched the latest public relations campaign to explain his Iraq strategy before a sea of midshipmen and a few invited guests. He stood in front of a “Plan for Victory” banner carefully placed by a White House advance crew.
His audience, filling most of Alumni Hall, applauded throughout his speech and saluted him with a standing ovation at the end.
It was Bush’s fourth speech about the war before a military audience since Nov. 11, when he lashed back at critics during a Veterans Day counter-attack at Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania. There, the backdrop banner was “Strategy for Victory,” and his message was aimed more broadly at the international war against terrorism.
The other two speeches were delivered at U.S. air bases in Alaska and South Korea.
Wednesday’s appearance at the Naval Academy, though, particularly rankled Kerry, who pointedly noted that he could not “summon the Naval Academy” or West Point, to the Capitol as a backdrop to respond to the president.
“The troops don’t belong to his point of view,” Kerry said. “They belong to America and to Americans. They are Americans.”
Pressed later on the military venues, White House press secretary Scott McClellan reminded reporters that the president is the commander in chief and the nation is at war.
“No one has more invested in the global war on terrorism and what we’re working to achieve in Iraq than our military and their families,” McClellan said.
McClellan has made it clear that the president will continue pressing his case in several more addresses before the Dec. 15 Iraqi elections.
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On Wednesday, Bush rolled out a new speech, dwelling in some new detail on the training of Iraqi troops and the face of the enemy. But neither his speech nor the strategy paper offered any sweeping new initiatives.
Still, Samuel Wells, associate director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said it was noteworthy that Bush was “finally talking about stages on a path of victory, which can also be read as a path to a reduction of U.S. ground forces.”
Before, Wells said, the president had been sticking closely to his line that “we’re going to stay there as long as it takes to get the job done.”
“It may arrest the erosion of support that he is seeing,” Wells said of Wednesday’s speech. “But I don’t think it’s going to turn the tide because I think people have finally started asking hard questions of the facts on the ground and not taking the assurances of the administration at face value.”
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(c) 2005, The Dallas Morning News.
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