Bush administration urges patience over Iraq
The Bush administration is sending a stay-the-course message on Iraq on the third anniversary of the US invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, although a top military commander acknowledges the insurgency is more fierce than expected.
“We are implementing a strategy that will lead to victory in Iraq,”
President George Bush, setting the tone for his administration, said in remarks as he returned from his Maryland mountaintop retreat; Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld had the same message.
“The Iraqi people voted for democracy last December; 75 per cent of the eligible citizens went to the polls. Now, the Iraqi leaders are working together to enact a government that reflects the will of the people,” the president said, at a time when polls at home are showing growing public scepticism about the mission.
Rumsfeld wrote a column for The Washington Post in which he declared: “Now is the time for resolve, not retreat. Turning our backs on post-war Iraq today would be the modern equivalent of handing post-war Germany back to the Nazis.”
Cheney echoed the president in hailing political progress in Iraq, noting that the Iraqis have met political deadlines set for them and predictng they will form a unified government “shortly”.
In an interview on CBS’ Face the Nation, Cheney flatly rejected a statement in which Iraq’s former interim prime minister said the increasing attacks can only be described as a civil war. “If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is,” Ayad Allawi told the BBC.
Instead, Cheney described the violence as the actions of terrorists who have “reached a stage of desperation”.
“What we’ve seen is a serious effort by them to foment a civil war,” Cheney said. “But I don’t think they’ve been successful.”
Yet there were acknowledgements from General George Casey that the situation is fragile and that he did not predict the strength of the insurgency.
“I did not think it would be as robust as it has been,” Casey, the top commander there, said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “And it’s something that, obviously, with my time here on the ground, my thinking on that has gained much greater clarity and insight.”
Bush did not mention the continuing insurgent attacks, the car bombs or the mounting Iraqi deaths in his two-minute statement to reporters. And he avoided using the word “war,” choosing instead to call the day “the third anniversary of the beginning of the liberation of Iraq”.
The president only indirectly referred to the violence when he said he spent the morning reflecting on the sacrifices made by US troops. Bush said he spoke by phone earlier in the day with the US ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, and had received a positive report.
Some 2,300 US servicemen and women have lost their lives in Iraq.
The White House is trying to remind the disapproving public of Bush’s vision for Iraq with a public relations blitz. The president plans to give a series of speeches on Iraq, beginning today in Cleveland.
More than three-quarters of the public thinks it is likely that Iraq is headed toward civil war, according to an AP-Ipsos poll taken in early March.
And two-thirds of Americans say the US is losing ground in preventing civil war in Iraq, according to a Pew Research Centre poll taken in the same period. That is up from 48 per cent in January.
