Troop surge will be rolled back, Bush says

Bush’s policy assures he will continue to clash with
congressional Democrats.

MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS

WASHINGTON — President Bush announced in a nationally televised address Thursday night that 5,700 U.S. troops would leave Iraq by December.

Bush formally embraced the recommendations made earlier this week by Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top commander in Iraq, to withdraw as many as 21,500 combat forces and an undetermined number of support troops by July.

That would effectively roll back the troop “surge” Bush ordered in January, while leaving more than 130,000 troops still in Iraq indefinitely — as many as were there before the surge began.

Bush asked the nation for patience, saying that more troops could return home as the situation improves on the ground, but he gave no specifics as to how many or when.

The president cast his gradual withdrawal plan as one based on a “return on success.”

“The more successful we are, the more American troops can come home,” Bush said from the Oval Office.

Unchanged

By leaving his war strategy effectively unchanged, Bush remains at odds with congressional Democrats who want to pull all U.S. combat troops out of Iraq on a rapid timetable. Their conflicting positions seem to assure that Congress and the president will continue to clash over Iraq and that the war will remain the dominant issue hanging over the 2008 presidential campaign.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement earlier Thursday that Bush’s plan would lead to 10 more years of U.S. war in Iraq, and she estimated the cost at $700 billion more over the next five years. That’s on top of $450 billion so far.

“The president’s war in Iraq has dangerously overstretched our military, left America less protected against terrorism and more vulnerable as other global threats emerge — all at the cost of nearly $1 trillion to the taxpayers,” Pelosi said.

Bush maintained that his surge is working, despite several recent blue-ribbon reports concluding that the Iraqis have failed to reach significant political goals. He sought to portray his troop-withdrawal announcement as the beginning of a healing process for war-weary Americans.

“Now, because of the measure of success we are seeing in Iraq, we can begin to bring troops home,” Bush said.

Smoke and mirrors

But Democratic lawmakers called Bush’s move a smoke-and-mirror act that will leave a large U.S. military presence in Iraq for years to come. They point out that 30,000 troops must return home in April anyway or face having their tours in Iraq extended beyond the scheduled 15 months, although White House officials say Petraeus’ plan gets them out faster.

“The ‘news’ will be the withdrawal of some troops, but the president will neglect to say that his plan will leave America in July 2008 where we were in January 2007,” House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland said before Bush’s address. “He will also fail to mention that this withdrawal is not a change in direction or a sign of success in Iraq — it is merely bowing to the reality that there are not troops available to maintain the ‘surge.’”

Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Bush’s Iraq strategy “is not succeeding.”

“It’s not making America safer,” he said. “Doing more of the same would be a disaster.”

Bush acknowledged that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government has failed to achieve national reconciliation, the goal the surge was supposed to facilitate, but he contended that political progress in Iraq is under way from the local level up.