Bush in plea for patience as Democrats call time on Iraq
The war has stretched longer, with higher costs, than the White House ever predicted. On the fourth anniversary of the day Bush directed the invasion to begin, the president made a televised statement from the White House Roosevelt Room to defend continued US involvement.
He said his plan to send 21,500 additional US troops to secure Baghdad and Iraq’s troubled Anbar Province “will need more time to take effect”, especially since fewer than half of the troop reinforcements have arrived in the capital. Mr Bush added: “There will be good days and bad days ahead as the security plan unfolds.”
Democrats are bringing a war spending bill to the House this week that would effectively require the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq by the fall of 2008, on top of providing funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the year. The White House has been pushing aggressively against this legislation, and Mr Bush did so again yesterday.
“It can be tempting to... conclude our best option is to pack up and go home,” he said, “That may be satisfying in the short run... [but] the consequences for America’s security would be devastating.”
Mr Bush ridiculed House Democrats’ legislation to remove troops, a measure he has promised to veto because it contains a timeline. He called it an abdication of US commitments to Iraqis.
“There’s a lot more work to be done and Iraq’s leaders must continue to work to meet the benchmarks they have set forward,” he said. “As Iraqis work to meet their commitments, we have important commitments of our own.”
The House’s war spending bill includes a troop withdrawal deadline of September 1, 2008. The timeline would speed up if the Iraqi government cannot meet its own benchmarks for providing security, allocating oil revenues and other essential steps towards normalisation.
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