Fort Bragg, N.C. – President Bush urged Americans not to lose faith in the Iraq war effort, using a prime-time address Tuesday evening to argue that the Iraq insurgents are the same breed of Islamic terrorist who struck the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.
Confronted with soft support from the public and a rising death toll in Iraq 27 months after the U.S. invasion, Bush spoke bluntly from this military base about the trauma overseas and about Americans’ desire to bring home the troops.
“Like most Americans, I see the images of violence and bloodshed,” Bush said to rows of silent soldiers in his televised speech. “Every picture is horrifying – and the suffering is real.
“Amid all this violence, I know Americans ask the question: Is the sacrifice worth it? It is worth it, and it is vital to the future security of our country?”
While the president recognized that “Americans want our troops to come home as quickly as possible,” he made it clear there would be no change in the Iraq strategy.
He ruled out both a deadline for troop withdrawal, as some in Congress have endorsed, and an increase in troop levels in Iraq. Rather, he called for Americans not to lose “our heart, our nerve” or to “forget the lessons of Sept. 11.”
“We fight today because terrorists want to attack our country and kill our citizens, and Iraq is where they are making their stand,” Bush said in the only passage of the 30-minute speech that drew applause from troops. “So we will fight them there, we will fight them across the world, and we will stay in the fight until the fight is won.”
Bush invoked Sept. 11 five times in his speech, and he referred to it by implication several more times. Although he has said previously that there is “no evidence” of a link between the attacks and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, he used much of his speech to portray the foes in Iraq and the perpetrators of the 2001 attack as the same. The White House titled his remarks a discussion on the “War on Terror,” not Iraq.
“This war reached our shores on Sept. 11, 2001,” he said. “The terrorists who attacked us – and the terrorists we face – murder in the name of a totalitarian ideology that hates freedom.”
He added that many of the foes in Iraq “are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania.”
The address continued a shift in the administration’s emphasis as it has justified the Iraq war, beginning with the threat posed by Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, continuing to the need to promote democracy in the Middle East, and now suggesting a more seamless link between Iraq and the attacks on American soil.
The new emphasis was preceded by Bush adviser Karl Rove in a speech last week that suggested that liberals favored responding to the attacks with “therapy and understanding” rather than military action.
“The only way our enemies can succeed is if we forget the lessons of Sept. 11, if we abandon the Iraqi people to men like Zarqawi, and if we yield the future of the Middle East to men like (Osama) bin Laden,” Bush said Tuesday night. He quoted bin Laden as calling the Iraq conflict a “third world war.”
The terrorists, he said, “are trying to shake our will in Iraq, just as they tried to shake our will on Sept. 11, 2001.”
After the speech, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., issued a statement saying that Bush’s “numerous references to Sept. 11 did not provide a way forward in Iraq” but instead “served to remind the American people that our most dangerous enemy, namely Osama bin Laden, is still on the loose.”
Bush’s speech returned the presidency’s focus to Iraq after a spring dedicated to Social Security and other domestic matters that allowed support for the war to soften. While Bush pointedly rebutted those who favor a quick withdrawal, he conceded nothing to critics.
He acknowledged no flaw in the administration’s Iraq policy, and he offered no specifics about the eventual exit from Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently said the insurgency in Iraq could take a decade or more to extinguish fully.
The speech offered little new in the way of policy or strategy but instead reframed an argument that Bush and his advisers believe has not been presented adequately to most Americans.
Bush had deliberately avoided talking much about Iraq in the first half of the year, both to dedicate his time to his legislative agenda and to allow the newly elected Baghdad government to take the lead in the public mind. Yet as they watched Bush’s approval ratings sink to the lowest level of his presidency and Democratic critics grow more assertive, increasingly restive White House advisers concluded a couple of weeks ago that Bush needed to use his stature to reclaim control of the political debate over Iraq.
His words were intended to counter what critics call a growing credibility gap fostered by such optimistic assessments as Vice President Dick Cheney’s recent claim that the insurgency is in its “last throes.”
Bush made no such claim himself Tuesday night, instead trying to stiffen American resolve for a long-term commitment.
