Bush’s speech today and largest vets group response

Bush signals withdrawal with new victory strategy
by Alec Russel

A strategy document on Iraq, declassified shortly before Mr Bush’s speech, said: “Lack of a timetable does not mean our posture in Iraq will remain static over time.

“We expect, but cannot guarantee, that our force posture will change over the next year.”

Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, was more specific. “In 2006 the expectation is the conditions will be changed on the ground,” he said.

Laura Bush was also wheeled out to support her husband, whose approval ratings, in the late 30s, are the lowest of his nearly five years in office.

“We want our troops to be able to come home as soon as they possibly can,” she said while hosting a tour of the White House Christmas decorations.

Mr Bush was speaking beside a huge placard that proclaimed “Plan for victory”.

His address was the centrepiece of a concerted strategy by the administration to counter the perception that his only policy is to “stay the course.”…

Democrats, however, dismissed his speech as more of the same “old rhetoric.” Senator John Kerry, his defeated challenger last year, likened the president’s performance to his address on an aircraft carrier in May 2003 when a big banner proclaimed, somewhat prematurely: “Mission accomplished.”

Mr Bush devoted the bulk of his 45-minute speech to argue that Iraqi forces were improving by the day and would soon be ready to take over many of the duties now carried out by US forces.

This is the critical part of his case – that Americans will be able to come home with their heads high. But he faces considerable scepticism given Iraqi forces’ poor record.

In a rare admission of failure, he conceded that the Iraqi forces had had a slow start.

“The training of the Iraqi security forces is an enormous task and it hasn’t always gone smoothly,” he said. “We all remember the reports of some Iraqi security forces running from the fight more than a year ago.”

The Iraqi civil defence corps did not initially have “sufficient firepower or training”, he added. And the Iraqi police recruits spent too much time “in classroom lectures” and received “limited training in the use of small arms”.

The White House yesterday gave its strongest hint that President George W Bush was contemplating the first withdrawal of troops from Iraq, although he insisted that America would not “cut and run”.

Mr Bush, speaking to thousands of naval recruits at the US Naval Academy, sought to perform the complex double act of arguing that he had a strategy for success in Iraq while also assuring the increasingly nervy public that he had a plan to bring the troops home.

In the first of four speeches ahead of the Iraqi elections in a fortnight, he said he would settle for nothing less than “complete victory”.

To set a timetable for a pull-out of America’s nearly 160,000 troops in Iraq would be a disaster, he stressed. “[It] would send the signal to our enemies that if they wait long enough America will cut and run and abandon its friends.”

The White House, however, came close to conceding that some troops will pull out next year, a move that jittery Republican congressmen are hoping will come before next November’s mid-term congressional elections.

But lessons had been learned. Last year, he conceded that only a “handful of Iraqi battalions” were combat ready. Now, he said, “there are over 120 Iraqi army and police combat battalions in the fight against terrorists”.

After accusations by Democrats that he was indulging in “happy talk”, Mr Bush was careful not to claim that the Iraqi forces were fighting on their own.

But in a clear attempt to address the concerns about US casualties, now more than 2,100 since the invasion in March 2003, he suggested that increasingly the US forces in Iraq would take a lower profile.

They would focus on targeting insurgent leaders rather than patrolling and guarding convoys.

The Pentagon has previously said that next year it would withdraw about 28,000 troops added in the autumn for extra election security.

Many in Washington expect a further 30,000 will be withdrawn within a year.

Largest Iraq veterans’ group says Bush plan falls short

Iraq Veteran and Operation Truth Executive Director Paul Rieckhoff released the following statement today, following President Bush’s speech at the Naval Academy.

The plan the President outlined for Iraq is an improvement over the administration’s previous plan, which consisted only of stay the course. But as a Veteran of this war and someone who talks to other Veterans everyday, I can say that in the eyes of the Troops, this plan still falls short in two important ways.

First, there are still no metrics for success. Our Troops must know what objective guidelines will be used to declare that a goal has been reached. They deserve to know that their road home is based on hard data and not just a subjective opinion of success.

Second, a timeline for success must be established. Whether that means one year, two years, or five years, our Troops need a realistic time frame in which to achieve a well-defined mission. Without that, our Troops and their families cannot prepare to meet the obligation of our commitment to the Iraqi people.

The President himself has recognized the need for a timeline in military operations in the past. During the 2000 campaign, the President’s own website stated, of the U.S. military engagement in Kosovo, The President should also lay out a timetable for how long American troops will be involved. One of the President’s own advisors said, [Vice President] Gore seems to have a vision of an indefinite U.S. military deployment in the Balkans. He proved today that if he is elected, America’s military will continue to be overdeployed, harming morale & re-enlistment rates, weakening our military’s core mission.1

The President must provide well-defined conditions for success and a timeline for our commitment in Iraq. Until that happens, his plan cannot be seen as credible in the eyes of the Troops and Veterans of this war. I wouldn’t give this plan a failing grade, I would give it an incomplete.’

Operation Truth is the nation’s first and largest Iraq War Veterans organization.

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