WASHINGTON, 13 July 2007 — President George W. Bush said yesterday that Americans can still win the war in Iraq, despite a bleak picture of progress in the war-wracked nation painted by a White House report.
Speaking after the release of a congressionally mandated report on Iraq yesterday, Bush said there had been progress on security in Iraq and that that would pave the way for progress on the political front there.
The interim report, written by nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, shows satisfactory progress on eight of 18 benchmarks, unsatisfactory results in another eight areas and mixed results in two. It says there has been little progress on key political issues, such as sharing oil revenues and political reconciliation.
Bush acknowledged that Americans were “tired of the war” in Iraq, but insisted that the conflict was winnable and the security situation improving.
“There’s war fatigue in America. It’s affecting our psychology,” Bush said at the news conference at the White House. “This is an ugly war... It doesn’t surprise me that there is deep concern among our people.”
Bush said that there had been “measurable progress” in improving security in parts of Baghdad, Anbar and Diyala provinces and said he would continue to veto any effort by the US Congress to place a deadline for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.
“I cannot look a mother and father of a troop in the eye and say, ‘I’m sending your kid into combat, but I don’t think we can achieve the objective,’” Bush said. “I believe we can succeed, and I believe we are making security progress that will enable the political track to succeed as well.”
He stressed that the report is preliminary and that he will wait until a September assessment to see if his strategy needs to be reconsidered.
Bush also announced he is sending Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates to the Middle East in August to re-emphasize the US commitment to the international pact at Sharm El-Sheikh. The eagerly awaited Iraq report predates a more definitive assessment of the surge strategy in September by top US commander in Iraq Gen. David Petraeus and US Ambassador to Baghdad Ryan Crocker.
That had been seen as the critical point for Bush’s Iraq strategy, but leaked conclusions from the interim version have sent the confrontation between the Democratic-led Congress and Bush over the war to boiling point. The CRS report comes amid growing pressure in Congress on the Bush administration to change course in Iraq. The House of Representatives is due to vote on a bill demanding the withdrawal of most combat troops from Iraq by April 1 next year, while the Senate plows through its own emotional debate over the war.
The redeployment would begin within 120 days and the president would be forced to report to Congress on why soldiers should stay in Iraq for limited purposes such as fighting terrorism or training Iraqi forces.
A similar bill is also being debated in the Senate, but both approaches mirror earlier Democratic attempts to end the war that Bush vetoed.
