WASHINGTON - Opening a new campaign to
sustain his "troop surge" strategy in Iraq, US
President George W Bush on Wednesday compared
Washington's ongoing struggle there to both World
War II and the Vietnam War, in the latter of
which, he said, Washington's withdrawal led to
disaster for "millions of innocent citizens".
Speaking in the state of Missouri to the
perennially hawkish Veterans of Foreign Wars
Convention, Bush also reiterated strong
support for Iraq's
increasingly besieged prime minister, Nuri
al-Maliki, whose reluctance to implement US plans
for national reconciliation has spurred growing
disillusionment - and even calls for his ouster by
influential lawmakers here.
"Prime
Minister Maliki's a good guy, good man with a
difficult job, and I support him," Bush declared.
"And it's not up to the politicians in Washington,
DC, to say whether he will remain in his position.
That is up to the Iraqi people, who now live in a
democracy and not a dictatorship."
Bush's
remarks, the first in a series of appearances and
other administration initiatives designed to rally
support for maintaining as many as 170,000 US
troops in Iraq well into next year in advance of a
critical report to Congress due in mid-September,
suggested to supporters and critics alike that the
president remains as determined as ever to hold
out against pressure, even from his own party, to
begin withdrawing troops in the coming months.
"The president is not going to change;
he's going to insist on staying the course," said
retired General John Johns, a counterinsurgency
specialist. "What is required is that the
Republican leadership in Congress force the
president [to change course]. I do not see that in
the works today, and I don't understand why."
Bush's speech, which followed the
overnight crash of a US Black Hawk helicopter in
which 14 American soldiers were killed - the worst
one-day US death toll in more than a year - came
amid growing speculation about both the fate of
Maliki's government and the report by Washington's
ambassador in Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, and its
military commander there, General David Petraeus,
which Congress may receive as early as September
11.
The report, which is supposed to be an
assessment of the six-month-old "surge" strategy,
is likely to echo what has become a growing
consensus in Washington over the past several
weeks - that while the addition of some 30,000 US
troops and the adoption of more aggressive
counterinsurgency tactics have succeeded in
reducing sectarian violence in Baghdad, virtually
no comparable progress has been made on the
political front.
Not only has the Iraqi
Parliament failed to approve legislation on the
distribution of oil revenues, on the eligibility
of former Ba'ath Party officials to return to
government, or on the holding of elections that
would give Sunnis a greater voice in provincial
and local councils, but the largest Sunni bloc
aligned with the government walked out this month.
Crocker himself on Tuesday called progress
toward national reconciliation "extremely
disappointing", while even Bush appeared to be
hedging his support for Maliki during a visit to
Canada the same day, calling on the Iraqi
government "to do more through its Parliament to
help heal the wounds of ... having lived years
under a tyrant".
Their remarks followed a
harsh assessment this week by the chairman of the
powerful US Senate Armed Services Committee,
Senator Carl Levin, on his return from his latest
trip to Iraq. Calling the regime "non-functional",
Levin said he hopes "the Parliament will vote the
Maliki government out of office and will have the
wisdom to replace it with a less sectarian and
more unifying prime minister and government".
Levin also released a joint statement
signed by the senior committee Republican and
another "surge" skeptic, Senator John Warner,
which conveyed much the same message, albeit in
somewhat softer language.
But most
analysts here believe it unlikely that Maliki will
be forced out, and that even if he is, a successor
will be any less sectarian given the current
balance of forces within the Parliament and the
apparent unwillingness of either the majority
Shi'ites or their Kurdish partners to make major
concessions to the Sunnis of the kind the US and
Crocker have been urging.
"You could swap
Maliki out for another Shi'ite, but frankly I
don't see the basic dynamics of Iraqi politics as
opening the door to the kind of reconciliation we
need," said Steven Simon of the Council on Foreign
Relations, who spoke with Johns during a
teleconference organized by the National Security
Network after Bush's speech.
Even while
Bush himself reiterated support for Maliki, the
Iraqi leader during a visit to Damascus on
Wednesday lashed out against the growing pressure
against him.
"The Iraqi government was
elected by the Iraqi people; no one has the right
to set a timetable for it," he said, referring to
Levin's remarks. "These statements do not concern
us much. We care for our people and our
constitution and can find friends elsewhere," he
added in a comment that Simon described as an
"implicit threat" that Iran is "perhaps a more
reliable ally [of his government] than the US".
By reiterating his support for Maliki and
by once again suggesting that a US withdrawal from
Iraq would have catastrophic results, Bush
appeared on Wednesday to be digging himself in for
a major new confrontation with Democrats in
Congress.
Boasting of recent military
successes, Bush said US troops were asking
"whether elected leaders in Washington pulled the
rug out from under them just as they're gaining
momentum and changing the dynamic on the ground in
Iraq. Here's my answer: we'll support our troops;
we'll support our commanders; and we will give
them everything they need to succeed."
Comparing Washington's current conflicts
in Iraq and Afghanistan to the "ideological
struggles" of World War II and "the communists in
Korea and Vietnam", Bush argued that the
subsequent transitions of Japan and South Korea
into democratic states should offer hope for
similar results in the Middle East.
As for
the Vietnam War, Bush implied that Washington's
withdrawal constituted a moral abdication to the
people of Indochina. "One unmistakable legacy of
Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal
was paid by millions of innocent citizens, whose
agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like
'boat people', 're-education camps' and 'killing
fields'.
"Unlike in Vietnam," he went on,
"if we were to withdraw before the job was done,
this enemy would follow us home." On the other
hand, a "free Iraq will be a massive defeat for
al-Qaeda [and] an example that provides hope for
millions throughout the Middle East. It'll be a
friend of the United States, and it's going to be
an important ally in the ideological struggle of
the 21st century."
But critics argued that
Bush fundamentally misunderstood the historical
precedents he cited. "Bush is cherry-picking
history to support his case for staying the
course," said Johns, who was a senior military
planner during the Vietnam War. "What I learned in
Vietnam is that US forces could not conduct a
counterinsurgency operation. The longer we stay
there [Iraq], the worse it's going to get."
As for Bush's references to the violence,
especially in Cambodia, that followed its
withdrawal from Indochina, Simon noted that much
of it happened "because the United States left too
late, not too early. It was the expansion of the
war [into Cambodia] that opened the door to Pol
Pot and the genocide of the Khmer Rouge. The
longer you stay the worse it gets."
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