WORLD / America
Bush keeps revising war justification
(AP)
Updated: 2006-10-15 09:02
WASHINGTON - US President Bush keeps revising his explanation for why the
U.S. is in Iraq, moving from narrow military objectives at first to
history-of-civilization stakes now.
President Bush speaks during a news conference in the White House in this
October 11, 2006, file photo. Bush said 'We can't tolerate a new
terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East, with large oil reserves
that could be used to fund its radical ambitions, or used to inflict
economic damage on the West. [AP]
Initially, the rationale was specific: to stop Saddam Hussein from using
what Bush claimed were the Iraqi leader's weapons of mass destruction or
from selling them to al-Qaida or other terrorist groups.
But 3 1/2 years later, with no weapons found, still no end in sight and
the war a liability for nearly all Republicans on the ballot Nov. 7, the
justification has become far broader and now includes the expansive
"struggle between good and evil."
Republicans seized on North Korea's reported nuclear test last week as
further evidence that the need for strong U.S. leadership extends beyond
Iraq.
Bush's changing rhetoric reflects increasing administration efforts to
tie the war, increasingly unpopular at home, with the global fight
against terrorism, still the president's strongest suit politically.
"We can't tolerate a new terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East,
with large oil reserves that could be used to fund its radical ambitions,
or used to inflict economic damage on the West," Bush said in a news
conference last week in the Rose Garden.
When no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, Bush shifted his
war justification to one of liberating Iraqis from a brutal ruler.
After Saddam's capture in December 2003, the rationale became helping to
spread democracy through the Middle East. Then it was confronting
terrorists in Iraq "so we do not have to face them here at home," and
"making America safer," themes Bush pounds today.
"We're in the ideological struggle of the 21st century," he told a
California audience this month. "It's a struggle between good and evil."
Vice President Dick Cheney takes it even further: "The hopes of the
civilized world ride with us," Cheney tells audiences.
Except for the weapons of mass destruction argument, there is some
validity in each of Bush's shifting rationales, said Michael O'Hanlon, a
foreign policy scholar at the Brookings Institution who initially
supported the war effort.
"And I don't have any big problems with any of them, analytically. The
problem is they can't change the realities on the ground in Iraq, which
is that we're in the process of beginning to lose," O'Hanlon said. "It is
taking us a long time to realize that, but the war is not headed the way
it should be."
Andrew Card, Bush's first chief of staff, said Bush's evolving rhetoric,
including his insistence that Iraq is a crucial part of the fight against
terrorism, is part of an attempt to put the war in better perspective for
Americans.
The administration recently has been "doing a much better job" in
explaining the stakes, Card said in an interview. "We never said it was
going to be easy. The president always told us it would be long and
tough."
"I'm trying to do everything I can to remind people that the war on
terror has the war in Iraq as a subset. It's critical we succeed in Iraq
as part of the war on terror," said Card, who left the White House in
March.
Bush at first sought to explain increasing insurgent and sectarian
violence as a lead-up to Iraqi elections. But elections came and went,
and a democratically elected government took over, and the sectarian
violence increased.
Bush has insisted U.S. soldiers will stand down as Iraqis stand up. He
has likened the war to the 20th century struggles against fascism, Nazism
and communism. He has called Iraq the "central front" in a global fight
against radical jihadists.
Having jettisoned most of the earlier, upbeat claims of progress, Bush
these days emphasizes consequences of setting even a limited withdrawal
timetable: abandonment of the Iraqi people, destabilizing the Middle East
and emboldening terrorists around the world.
The more ominous and determined his words, the more skeptical the
American public appears, polls show, both on the war itself and over
whether it is part of the larger fight against terrorism, as the
administration insists.
Bush's approval rating, reflected by AP-Ipsos polls, has slid from the
mid 60s at the outset of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 to the high
30s now. There were light jumps upward after the December 2003 capture of
Saddam, Bush's re-election in November 2004 and each of three series of
aggressive speeches over the past year. Those gains tended to vanish
quickly.
With the war intruding on the fall elections, both parties have stepped
up their rhetoric.
Republicans, who are also reeling from the congressional page scandal,
are casting Democrats as seeking to "cut and run" and appease terrorists.
Democrats accuse Bush of failed leadership with his "stay the course"
strategy. They cite a government intelligence assessment suggesting the
Iraq war has helped recruit more terrorists, and a book by journalist Bob
Woodward that portrays Bush as intransigent in his defense of the Iraq
war and his advisers as bitterly divided.
Democrats say Iraq has become a distraction from the war against
terrorism �� not a central front. But they are divided among themselves
on what strategy to pursue.
Republicans, too, increasingly are growing divided as U.S. casualties
rise.
"I struggle with the fact that President Bush said, `As the Iraqis stand
up, we will stand down.' But the fact is, this has not happened," said
Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., a war supporter turned war skeptic.
The Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sen. John
Warner of Virginia, said after a recent visit to Iraq that Iraq was
"drifting sideways." He urged consideration of a "change of course" if
the Iraq government fails to restore order over the next two or three
months.
More than 2,750 members of the U.S. military have died since the
beginning of the war, most of them since Bush's May 2003 "mission
accomplished" aircraft carrier speech. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have
died.
Recent events have been dispiriting.
The United States now has about 141,000 troops in Iraq, up from about
127,000 in July. Some military experts have suggested at least one
additional U.S. division, or around 20,000 troops, is needed in western
Iraq alone.
Dan Benjamin, a former Middle East specialist with the National Security
Council in the Clinton administration, said the administration is
overemphasizing the nature of the threat in an effort to bolster support.
"I think the administration has oversold the case that Iraq could become
a jihadist state," said Benjamin, now with the Center for Strategic and
International Studies. "If the U.S. were to leave Iraq tomorrow, the
result would be a bloodbath in which Sunnis and Shiites fight it out. But
the jihadists would not be able to seek power."
Not all of Bush's rhetorical flourishes have had the intended
consequences.
When the history of Iraq is finally written, the recent surge in
sectarian violence is "going to be a comma," Bush said in several recent
appearances.
Critics immediately complained that the remark appeared unsympathetic and
dismissive of U.S. and Iraqi casualties, an assertion the White House
disputed.
For a while last summer, Bush depicted the war as one against "Islamic
fascism," borrowing a phrase from conservative commentators. The strategy
backfired, further fanning anti-American sentiment across the Muslim
world.
The "fascism" phrase abruptly disappeared from Bush's speeches,
reportedly after he was talked out of it by Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice and Karen Hughes, a longtime Bush confidant now with the
State Department.
Hughes said she would not disclose private conversations with the
president. But, she told the AP, she did not use the "fascism" phrase
herself. "I use `violent extremist,'" she said.
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