WASHINGTON - Hoping to reverse plunging
confidence in his strategy for Iraq - and in his
own leadership - US President George W Bush on
Wednesday launched a major campaign to persuade
the public that Washington is indeed prevailing
against the insurgency there.
Speaking
before a generally friendly, if somewhat
restrained audience of cadets at the US Naval
Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, Bush vowed to
settle for "nothing less than complete victory"
and repeated previous warnings against setting a
timetable for the withdrawal
of US forces.
To coincide with Bush's
speech, however, the White House released a
"National Strategy for Victory in Iraq", which
suggested that the administration is indeed
preparing to draw down US troops in 2006.
"We expect, but cannot guarantee, that our
force posture will change over the next year, as
the political process consolidates and as Iraqi
security forces grow and gain experience," the
35-page document stated, noting as well that US
forces would increasingly "move to supporting
roles in most areas".
And in spite of
Bush's insistence that the US would not leave
until it achieved "complete victory", the strategy
document asserted that Iraq "is likely to struggle
with some level of violence for many years to
come".
Bush's speech, as well as the
strategy document's release, marks the beginning
of an unprecedented campaign to rally the public
behind the president, as well as his policy in
Iraq.
With his approval ratings hovering
below 40% for several weeks, Bush's political
advisers, as well as independent analysts, believe
that the public's perceptions of success or
failure in Iraq will largely determine his
political potency over the three years that remain
in his presidency.
In addition to
Wednesday's address, Bush plans to give several
other speeches on Iraq in the coming days, each
featuring different aspects of his
administration's strategy and culminating in what
the White House fervently hopes will be a huge
turnout in Iraq's elections on December 15.
Other top officials, including the new
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General
Peter Pace, have also scheduled speaking
engagements that the White House hopes will not
only dominate news coverage, but also make it
appear that the strategy is one that is fully
backed by the military itself.
That
perception is regarded as particularly important
at the moment, both because the administration and
its supporters have tried hard in recent weeks to
equate growing calls for withdrawal with a
betrayal of the country's soldiers, and because
some of those calls have been endorsed by critics,
notably Democratic Representative John Murtha,
with particularly close and long-standing ties to
the uniformed military.
Murtha, a
well-known hawk and highly decorated Marine
veteran from both the Korean and Vietnam wars,
shocked Washington two weeks ago when he called on
Bush to withdraw all US troops from Iraq by
mid-2006. "Our troops have become the primary
target of the insurgency" and had become "a
catalyst for violence", he said. "It's time to
bring them home."
While most of his fellow
Democrats argued for a less-hurried withdrawal of
the nearly 160,000 troops who are currently
deployed there, Murtha's stance, coupled with
Bush's declining poll numbers and growing unrest
among Republican lawmakers over Iraq's impact on
their reelection prospects next November, spurred
panic in the administration.
It also
infuriated Bush's hawkish and neo-conservative
supporters, who launched their own media campaign
accusing critics of "cutting and running" and
reassuring the public that all the talk of
withdrawal would "snatch defeat from the jaws of
victory" in Iraq.
"The Iraqi people are in
reach of a watershed transformation from the
primitive killing tyranny of Saddam [Hussein] to
modern, self-governing, self-securing nationhood,"
wrote Senator Joseph Lieberman, Congress' leading
Democratic neo-conservative, in The Wall Street
Journal on Tuesday, "unless this unexpected
opportunity the great American military has given
them and us is prematurely withdrawn."
It
was not by accident that Bush extolled Lieberman
in Wednesday's 40-minute speech. Like the former
Democratic vice presidential candidate, he
insisted that Iraq had made "incredible progress"
in the past two-and-a-half years and was on the
verge of a major breakthrough in its
transformation into a democratic state.
The
core of his remarks, however, was devoted to
outlining progress made in training and equipping
an estimated 210,000 Iraqi military and police
forces, whose ability to replace US troops is seen
by both the administration and its critics as the
key to securing the latter's withdrawal sooner
rather than later.
While the process
"hasn't always gone smoothly", he admitted, "in
the past year, Iraqi forces have made real
progress" both in being able to operate
independently of US forces and "hold[ing]"
territory and towns that had been cleared of
insurgents by US or joint US-Iraqi forces on their
own.
The growing capabilities of the
security forces, Bush went on in an echo of the
strategy document, will translate into reduced
visibility and presence of US troops. "We will
increasingly move out of Iraqi cities, reduce the
number of bases from which we operate and conduct
fewer patrols and convoys," he said.
"As
the Iraqi forces gain experience and the political
process advances, we will be able to decrease our
troop levels in Iraq without losing our capability
to defeat the terrorists," he went on, adding that
those reductions "will be driven by the conditions
on the ground in Iraq ... not by artificial
timetables set by politicians in Washington", in
what was one of several notes of defiance that
peppered the speech.
However, beneath that
rhetoric, as well as in the new strategy document,
could be found an approach to Iraq significantly
closer to that advocated by realist critics
ranging from former national security adviser,
Brent Scowcroft, to ranking Democrats, than to the
neo-conservative vision with which the
administration went to war in 2003.
"I
think that Bush was trying to put the best
possible face on a policy that he's being forced
to change by circumstances both here and in Iraq,"
Lawrence Korb of the Campaign for American
Progress and co-author of a widely cited
"redeployment plan" that calls for a gradual
withdrawal from Iraq, told Inter Press Service.
"There's no doubt that if you look at the
troops that have been alerted to go next year,
that you will have less than 100,000 troops in
Iraq by the end of 2006," he added.
That
was made evident not only by the references to the
reduced visibility and presence of US forces, but
also to a much more nuanced breakdown of the
"enemy" as consisting mostly of "rejectionists".
These are described by Bush as "ordinary
Iraqis, mostly Sunni Arabs" who must, as the
strategy document made particularly clear, be
cultivated through political means in order to
isolate harder-core foes - "former regime
loyalists" and "the terrorists affiliated with or
inspired by al-Qaeda".
The strategy
document implicitly assails the de-Ba'athification
program that was so vigorously advocated by
neo-conservatives and expresses serious concerns
about the infiltration of the new security forces
by Kurdish and Shi'ite militia.
But it
appears above all to reflect the more realist
views of US ambassador in Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad;
his military counterpart, General George Casey;
and the new Deputy National Security Adviser for
Iraq and Afghanistan, Meghan O'Sullivan, who
clashed frequently with neo-conservatives in the
Pentagon before and after the US invasion.
