WASHINGTON - Despite fading public - and
Republican - confidence in his performance in Iraq
and the wider "war on terror", US president George
W Bush on Thursday raised the stakes by warning
that a US withdrawal from Iraq would lead to a
takeover by al-Qaeda and the subversion of
Baghdad's pro-Western neighbors.
In his
longest - and most Churchillian - defense of US
strategy to date, Bush insisted that Washington
would persevere in Iraq, if for no other reason
than the alternative would be so dire.
"This enemy considers every retreat of the
civilized world as an invitation to greater
violence," he declared to his audience at the
National Endowment
for Democracy (NED). "In Iraq, there is no peace
without victory. We will keep our nerve and we
will win that victory."
Bush also attacked
Syria and Iran by name, calling the two countries
"allies of convenience" of Islamic radicals "with
a long history of collaboration with terrorists".
Both countries have been the subject of
meetings over the past 10 days of Bush's top
national security aides, amid growing calls by
neo-conservatives, in particular, to conduct
military raids on targets in Syria to stop the
alleged infiltration of radical Islamic fighters
across the border into Iraq. US troops are
currently engaged in sweeps in western Iraq close
to the frontier.
"The United States makes
no distinction between those who commit acts of
terror and those who support and harbor them,
because they're equally as guilty of murder," Bush
said in a reprise of the pre-invasion warnings
against Iraq when Washington accused Baghdad of
supporting al-Qaeda.
And, in a further
warning to Iran, Bush said he was "determined to
deny weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to outlaw
regimes, and to their terrorist allies who would
use them without hesitation".
The main
message of the speech, however, appeared to be
aimed primarily at his fellow citizens, and
particularly Republicans and senior military
officers who have become increasingly uneasy about
the direction of Bush's anti-terrorist campaign,
especially in Iraq.
Republican nervousness
was on embarrassing display Wednesday night when,
despite repeated White House veto threats, all but
nine Republican senators joined their Democratic
colleagues in attaching an amendment to the 2006
defense appropriations bill that banned the use of
torture or inhumane treatment against detainees
held by US forces.
The 90-9 vote was the
most one-sided repudiation of a Bush policy
position since he became president in 2001.
"Republicans are saying that they just
voted their conscience on the issue of torture,"
noted one Senate aide who works for a Democrat.
"But if the war were going better, you know they
wouldn't have voted to embarrass the president in
the way they just did."
Likewise, for
several months now, senior officers have
repeatedly suggested that the US military presence
in Iraq may actually be fueling the insurgency
there, as well as providing new recruits to
al-Qaeda elsewhere in Europe and the Islamic
world, and that the most effective way to counter
both trends is to begin withdrawing troops.
Just this past week, for example, the top
US commander in Iraq, General George Casey, told a
Congressional panel that the continued US military
presence "feeds the notion of occupation", while
his superior officer, General John Abizaid,
testified at the same hearing that it was critical
to "reduce our military footprint" in the region
to "make clear to the people [there] that we have
no designs on their territory and resources".
In that context, Bush's emphatic rejection
of such advice on Thursday, however, appeared
designed to quash dissension and enforce
discipline, particularly given the prominent
presence in the audience of the new chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace, as
well as his boss, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld.
"It may be his way of telling the generals
to stop talking about drawing down the forces,"
David Mack, a retired ambassador and vice
president of the Middle East Institute who served
as deputy assistant secretary of state for Near
Eastern Affairs under Bush's father, told Inter
Press Service.
The fact that the NED, a
bastion of neo-conservatism, was the chosen forum
for Bush's speech was also significant. It was
there in November 2003 that the president first
spelled out his "forward strategy of freedom" for
the Middle East after his pre-invasion rationales
for going to war with Iraq - its WMDs and alleged
links with al-Qaeda - proved to be unfounded.
Like his 2005 inaugural address, that
speech was optimistic in style and tone, arguing
that the construction of a democratic Iraq would
produce a domino effect on the rest of the region
that would spread freedom to Iran and the Arab
world and thus reduce the resentments and
frustrations that produced Islamic radicalism.
Thursday's speech, by contrast, was
animated far more by fear than by hope,
particularly in its implicit admission that, as
Mack put it, "the tables have turned" in the
almost two years that have intervened.
"Instead of using Iraq as a way to
transform the region, they now seem to recognize
that they have put organizations like al-Qaeda in
a position to transform the region in its favor.
If you follow [Bush's] logic, that's what has
happened: we've gone from this great opportunity
to democratize the region to, 'oh my God, we have
to prevent even worse things from happening',"
Mack said.
Thus, Bush stressed that he
concurred in Osama bin Laden's own depiction of
Iraq as "the central front in the war on terror",
and warned that "the militants believe that
controlling one country will rally the Muslim
masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate
governments in the region, and establish a radical
Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia.
"With greater economic and military and
political power, the terrorists would be able to
advance their stated agenda: to develop weapons of
mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate
Europe, to assault the American people and to
blackmail our government into isolation.
"Some might be tempted to dismiss these
goals as fanatical and extreme. Well, they are
fanatical and extreme - and they should not be
dismissed," he went on, comparing the radicals to
Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot in
Cambodia, and echoing the neo-conservative mantra,
"Evil men, obsessed with ambition and unburdened
by conscience, must be taken very seriously, and
we must stop them before their crimes can
multiply."
Thus, a key element of US
strategy must be to "deny the militants control of
any nation, which they would use as a home base
and a launching pad for terror," he said, citing
US military operations against "remnants of the
Taliban and their al-Qaeda allies" in Afghanistan,
as well as the fight against "regime remnants and
terrorists in Iraq", and Washington's "working
with President [General Pervez] Musharraf to
oppose and isolate militants in Pakistan".
The argument that withdrawing from Iraq
would actually make it more difficult for al-Qaeda
and its allies to recruit and operate there was a
"dangerous illusion", Bush said, "refuted by the
simple question: 'Would the United States and
other free nations be more safe, or less safe,
with [Abu Musab al-] Zarqawi and bin Laden in
control of Iraq, its people and its resources'?"
Unusual for Bush, he also warned, "This
war will require more sacrifice, more time and
more resolve."
