Despite the first vote in the House calling for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, President Bush remains resolute in telling the country that he can and will win his war there. And for the time being, there?s nothing his critics can do to convince or force him to think otherwise.
That is the unambiguous message out of his long and sober news conference the other day. He made clear that whatever war votes are passed by Congress in the next two months, he intends to stay the course awaiting the promised mid-September report of Gen. David Petraeus.
It is a message that will not keep those Democrats most determined to get the troops out or redeployed to safer venues from attempting legislative remedies. But restive and impatient Republicans realize all they can do between now and mid-September is accept the freeze Bush has deftly imposed, and help him sustain it.
The president accentuated the positive in the mixed-bag interim report he presented. Doing so was not as persuasive with Congress as the fact that, without the votes needed to override his promised vetoes, it has no choice but to wait for Petraeus? report.
The president continues to emphasize that he as commander in chief is responsible for the conduct of the war, not Congress. His repeated emphasis on his reliance on the commander on the ground, though, elevates Petraeus almost to iconic stature not seen since the days of the late Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
Bush has always said he depends on his generals in Iraq to tell him when American troops can be withdrawn. But that hasn?t stopped him from ignoring them and letting them “retire” when what he has heard from them has not been to his liking.
He has described Petraeus as a straight-shooter who will relate the situation in Iraq two months from now without embellishment. From what the general has said already, however, he is likely to report what he will need is more time. And that is a message that Congress, having for so long avoided drastic action to bring about change in the war policy, will not swallow easily.
Back in January, when Bush announced his decision to send a “surge” of as many as 30,000 more troops into Iraq to contain the violence and give the Baghdad government breathing room, he labeled it “a new way forward.” It looked to skeptics like more of the “stay the course”formula to which he had clung over nearly four years.
If the Petraeus report in September does no more than produce arguments for more time, it could finally bring about a turning point in the war, or at least in Bush?s unbending commitment to a stable Iraq democracy.
For now, the president continues to offer the same arguments for persevering that he has used from the start ? that if we don?t confront in Iraq the enemies who attacked us on Sept. 11, they will again “come here” to hit us. “The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq were the ones who attacked us in America” in 2001, he told the news conference.
This allusion to the widely discredited link between Iraq and the perpetrators of the attacks of Sept. 11 implies that the insurgent group now referred to as “al Qaeda in Iraq” was involved. In fact, it surfaced after the invasion had made Iraq the center of the war against terrorism.
From the first days of the war, the Bush administration played on the discredited link as both a justification for the invasion and a catalyst for public support thereafter. Even after the president eventually acknowledged there was no such direct link, he has continued to mention it as he did the other day.
He also predicted then that the war against terrorism will go on after he leaves the White House and therefore he must stay the course in Iraq. It sounded like another way of saying he intends to hand the Iraq mess over to the next president in 2009, which may well be the case if there is no change in his “new way forward.”
Jules Witcover, a Baltimore Examiner columnist, is syndicated by Tribune Media Services. He has covered national affairs from Washington for more than 50 years and is the author of 11 books, and co-author of five others, on American politics and history.
