Speech: Grim News About Iraq

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Monday, September 08, 2003 5:36 AM

Speech: Grim News About Iraq

 

 

 

 

Grim News About Iraq

 

By DAVID E. SANGER

 

WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 President Bush's task tonight was to convince the

country that the terrible toll of the long, hot, casualty ridden summer in

Iraq was a necessary price to pay in a broader struggle against terrorism,

and to prepare the electorate for years of occupation, billions more in

expense, and many bad days.

 

His sobering speech to the nation was not the one that the White House was

envisioning for the president four months after he declared the end of the

" active combat " phase of the war. Even in July, as Mr. Bush prepared for a

month at his ranch, his aides were talking optimistically about a fall

devoted to transforming Iraq quickly into a model democracy at the heart of

the Middle East, and making its transition to a peaceful nation contagious

throughout the region.

 

Now there is reason to wonder whether that vision was unrealistically

optimistic at least on the time scale Mr. Bush and his aides once described

or whether it was, as one of his former foreign policy advisers put it

recently, " optimism blended with a touch of naïveté. "

 

Every week events from Baghdad to Jerusalem seem to be spinning out of the

control of a Bush team that, during the president's trip to the region in

late May, seemed intent on demonstrating that it now had the power to

transform the region.

 

Last month's bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, and

this weekend's resignation of the Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud

Abbas, on whom Mr. Bush had pinned so many of his hopes of a broader Middle

East peace, only reinforced the sense that the president's post-Iraq

strategy will need to be rewritten once again.

 

This evening, with his poll numbers dropping and his political problems

mounting, Mr. Bush insisted there was no turning back. He described

America's mission in the region as open-ended, and came up with his own

echo of John F. Kennedy's famous inaugural phrase that the United States

would " pay any price, bear any burden " to defend liberty.

 

Iraq, he intoned, is now " the central front " in the war on terrorism, and

he vowed " We will do what is necessary, we will spend what is necessary to

achieve this essential victory in the war on terror, to promote freedom,

and to make our own nation more secure. "

 

For the first time he named that price: $87 billion for the first full year

of occupation and reconstruction, of continuing his battle in Iraq and

Afghanistan and his search for Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. It is a

figure many experts believe may yet prove low.

 

In that sense, he has made the Middle East what Southeast Asia was to the

nation of his youth: a place where dominoes could not be allowed to fall,

where a vicious ideology could not be permitted to take hold and spread.

His argument to the wider world tonight was that it had to put aside the

bruising conflict with his administration over whether the invasion of Iraq

was justified, and now had to join the fight to make the American

experiment in Iraq work. The price of failure, he argued, would be too high

for all.

 

His message to Americans whom he clearly wanted to remind of his leadership

after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon two

years ago this week was simple: " The dangers have not passed. " Just as in

the cold war, when presidents from Truman to Nixon argued that America was

the target of Communists, Mr. Bush said, " We are fighting that enemy in

Iraq and Afghanistan today, so that we do not meet him again on our own

streets, in our own cities. "

 

With that phrase, he fully merged the challenge of the occupation of Iraq

with the terrorism of Al Qaeda, even though his own intelligence agencies

found no link between Mr. Hussein and the conspirators of Sept. 11. Now, in

a post-Iraq world, Mr. Bush is saying that link makes no difference the

arrival of terrorists blowing up Americans in Baghdad and Tikrit in the

postwar period have turned this into a single war.

 

" The Middle East will either become a place of progress and peace, or it

will be an exporter of violence and terror that takes more lives in America

and in other free nations, " Mr. Bush insisted, in justifying the cost in

blood and deficit-inducing spending. " The triumph of democracy and

tolerance in Iraq, in Afghanistan and beyond would be a grave setback for

international terrorism. "

 

To some of Mr. Bush's admirers, like Eliot A. Cohen, a military expert at

Johns Hopkins University, tonight's speech was " an overdue explaining of

the case he has a sophisticated argument to make about changing Iraq and

making it a decent place and a role model for the Mideast, but he doesn't

make it often enough, " or in enough detail. " I'm struck by the fact that

the view of elites, Democrats and Republicans, is that this has to be made

to work, and the argument is over how. "

 

To his critics including most of the Democratic presidential aspirants, who

believe that Mr. Bush's initial go-it-alone instincts have become his

biggest political vulnerability the president is wrongly blending the war

against terrorism with the effort to build a stable Iraq.

 

" I think it bears little to no resemblance to the war on terrorism, " said

James Steinberg, who served as President Clinton's deputy national security

adviser and is now a scholar at the Brookings Institution. " There was a

theory in this White House that if you were just tough, and knocked Saddam

and those like him off, people would not mess with you anymore, " he said

tonight. " They would no longer regard you as weak.

 

" Now there is a risk that our muscularity, if not used in a smart way,

could make us more vulnerable, not less. "

 

Mr. Bush's aides dispute the notion that Iraq is now a more fertile

breeding ground for terrorists than it was before Mr. Hussein was deposed,

despite the arrival of what Mr. Bush described tonight as " foreign

terrorists. " In interviews in recent days they have played down the

coordination of the Baathists, suspected Qaeda members and other fighters,

and Mr. Bush said tonight " we cannot be certain to what extent these groups

work together. " But left unstated tonight was the critical question looming

over the president as he goes before the United Nations this month, and the

electorate next year: How quickly can he bring order out of the chaos?

 

He did not say tonight, and his Secretary of State, Colin L. Powell,

appearing earlier in the day on the NBC News program " Meet the Press, " did

not sound as if even the passage of a United Nations resolution would bring

much more force to quieting Iraq he guessed 10,000 to 15,000 more foreign

troops, at best a 10 percent increase over the forces now on the ground.

 

Yet the occupation forces face an environment far more complex than than

the occupations of Japan and Germany, the models of success Mr. Bush cited

tonight. Both were cohesive nations long before their defeat; Iraq never

has been. And while there was more to rebuild in Tokyo and Berlin in 1945

than in Baghdad in 2003, the occupied were not shooting at the occupiers.

That is why Mr. Bush could not predict the end point of the conflict he was

rallying the country around tonight, and that is the problem he must solve

first.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/08/international/worldspecial/08ASSE.html?pag

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