Bush plays up progress in Iraq, but admits it's 'reversible'
Underscoring the Iraqi government's willingness to take on insurgents, the president cites numerous political and economic improvements. The U.S. mission in the country, however, will take a while to complete, he adds.
RIVERSIDE, OHIO — President Bush said today that Iraq was making notable economic and political progress, matching what he has presented as improved security conditions, and is assuming greater responsibility for reconstruction while trying to build a modern democracy from "the rubble of three decades of tyranny."
He attributed much of the improvement to what he presented as the success of the year-long increase in U.S. troops -- suggesting a reluctance to reduce the deployment in coming weeks and months.
"The progress isn't glamorous, but it is important," Bush said, and any failure to move quickly was not an example of Iraqi "foot-dragging," but rather a reflection of the "revolutionary" nature of the challenge.
With his top commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, and the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, scheduled to report to Congress next month, the president said he would soon announce his decisions about the next steps in Iraq.
In making those decisions, he said, he would remember that "the progress in Iraq is real, it is substantive, but it is reversible."
Bush spoke to about 1,000 people, many of them Air Force personnel, at the National Museum of the United States Air Force near Dayton, delivering the third of three speeches over the last three weeks intended to present a broad look at U.S. policy in Iraq, the course of the war, and conditions on the ground, five years after the U.S. invasion.
Flanked by a B-86 bomber of Korean War vintage and an F-22, an aircraft now in the U.S. force, with a Predator drone hanging from the ceiling of a hangar and a B-52 nearby, the president delivered a lengthy, muscular, but low-key speech urging the Americans to turn aside entreaties that it scale down its involvement in Iraq in the face of efforts there by the "world terrorist movement."
At the same time, he sought to tie Iran to the new violence in Basra, a largely Shiite city near the Iraq-Iran border.
He said the response by the Iraqi government to insurgent strength there demonstrated the readiness, and willingness, of the U.S.-supported government of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki to take on fighters that Bush said were receiving Iranian support.
He said Maliki had made a "bold decision" to wage the battle there with Iraqi security forces, and that Iraqi leadership of the operation showed the progress that government security forces are making while demonstrating to the Iraqi people that "their government is committed to protecting them."
