Washington – While President Bush acknowledges the need for major changes in Iraq, he will not use this week’s Iraq Study Group report as political cover for bringing troops home, his national security adviser said Sunday.
“We have not failed in Iraq,” Stephen Hadley said as he made the talk-show rounds. “We will fail in Iraq if we pull out our troops before we’re in a position to help the Iraqis succeed.”
But he added: “The president understands that we need to have a way forward in Iraq that is more successful.”
The White House readied for an important week in the debate over Iraq: Bush planned a meeting today with Abdul-Aziz al- Hakim, the Shiite leader of the largest bloc in Iraq’s parliament, and awaits the recommendations Wednesday from the bipartisan commission.
Yet his administration, hoping to find a new way ahead in Iraq, found itself on the defensive from the second recent leak of an insider’s memo on Iraq in a week.
The latest, first reported in Sunday’s New York Times, showed that Donald Rumsfeld called for a “major adjustment” in U.S. tactics Nov. 6 – the day before an election that cost Republicans the Congress and Rumsfeld his job as defense secretary.
Hadley played down the memo as simply a laundry list of ideas rather than a call for a new course of action.
He said Bush – just before a pivotal election – was not portraying a different sense of the war to the public than his defense secretary was giving him in private.
The president “has said publicly what Rumsfeld said, that things are not proceeding well enough or fast enough in Iraq,” Hadley said.
Democrats did not buy that.
“The Rumsfeld memo makes it quite clear that one of the greatest concerns is the political fallout from changing course here in the United States,” said Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “The bottom line is there is no one, including the former secretary, who thought the policy the president continues to pursue makes any sense.”
Update
Developments:
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani on Sunday rejected suggestions that an international conference be held to address the violence racking his country, saying, “We are an independent and a sovereign nation, and it is we who decide the fate of the nation.”
Saddam Hussein’s lawyers formally appealed the death sentence imposed on their client after he was convicted in the killings of 148 Shiite Muslims.
Casualties:
The U.S. military reported that nine Americans died in weekend fighting in the Baghdad area and restive Anbar province, west of the capital, making it one of the deadliest periods for U.S. forces in Iraq since early November.
A U.S. airstrike flattened a building in Iraq’s volatile west, killing two women and a toddler during combat that also killed six militants.
The U.S. Air Force on Sunday declared as killed in action the pilot of an F-16 fighter jet that went down elsewhere in Anbar on Nov. 27. It said DNA analysis had confirmed that remains found at the crash site 20 miles northwest of Baghdad were those of Maj. Troy L. Gilbert, 34.
