Bush asks for time to let Iraq plan work

WASHINGTON – President Bush used his State of the Union address Tuesday night to try to revive his presidency against what may be the greatest odds any chief executive has faced in a generation.

Other presidents have faced difficult moments and others have been dealt electoral setbacks, but few have faced the combination of obstacles that now confront this White House. Bush arrived at the Capitol at his lowest point in public-opinion polls, confronted by new Democratic majorities in the House and Senate and facing lame-duck status as attention turns rapidly toward a 2008 presidential campaign that will choose his successor.

The president’s problems all stem from the same reality. The public has lost confidence in his Iraq war policy, and, in the face of evidence that Americans are looking for a change in course, the president has to deploy additional troops to the conflict – a direction the public overwhelmingly opposes.

But his response Tuesday night was a speech that was very much in keeping with the style of leadership he has demonstrated repeatedly in office. If he was humbler in tone and rhetorically generous to his Democratic opponents in calling for cooperation, he was anything but defensive.

Bush implored lawmakers and the nation to give him one more chance to win the war in Iraq and avoid the “nightmare scenario” of defeat.

Politically wounded but rhetorically unbowed, Bush gave no ground on his decision to dispatch 21,500 more troops to Iraq despite a bipartisan cascade of criticism. Addressing for the first time a Congress controlled by the other party, Bush challenged Democrats “to show our enemies abroad that we are united in the goal of victory” and warned that the consequences of failure in Iraq “would be grievous and far-reaching.”

“I respect you and the arguments you have made,” Bush told skeptical lawmakers from both parties in his sixth State of the Union address and the fourth since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. “We went into this largely united – in our assumptions and in our convictions. And whatever you voted for, you did not vote for failure. Our country is pursuing a new strategy in Iraq, and I ask you to give it a chance to work.”

With new House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., sitting behind him in a sign of the power shift on Capitol Hill, Bush congratulated Democrats on their victory in the November midterm elections and reached out to them with ideas to expand health care coverage, overhaul immigration laws and improve education performance. In his most ambitious new proposal, he laid out a plan to reduce projected gasoline consumption in the United States by 20 percent over the next 10 years.

Democrats seemed unimpressed by his governing blueprint and signaled that they are in no mood to meet him in the middle. Long before Bush arrived in the House chamber to deliver his remarks, Democratic leaders and allied interest groups rushed out statements blasting his domestic proposals as rehashed ideas, empty rhetoric or flawed concepts that would create other problems. But the divide between president and Congress was most inflamed by his leadership of a war approaching the four-year mark.

“The president took us into this war recklessly,” said freshman Sen. James Webb, D-Va., a former Marine who was tapped to give the formal response. Accusing Bush of disregarding warnings by national security experts before invading Iraq, Webb added: “We are now, as a nation, held hostage to the predictable – and predicted – disarray that has followed.”

Bush devoted about half of his speech Tuesday night to Iraq and foreign policy, largely recapitulating his familiar argument that the war is the central front in a broader battle with terrorists and represents a “generational struggle that will continue long after you and I have turned our duties over to others.” He linked Sunni insurgents, Shiite extremists, al-Qaida terrorists and Hezbollah militants as arms of a broader radical movement but acknowledged that the mission in Iraq has changed from deposing Saddam Hussein to stopping sectarian violence.

“This is not the fight we entered in Iraq, but it is the fight we are in,” he said. “Every one of us wishes that this war were over and won. Yet it would not be like us to leave our promises unkept, our friends abandoned and our own security at risk. Ladies and gentlemen, on this day, at this hour, it is still within our power to shape the outcome of this battle. So let us find our resolve and turn events toward victory.”

He did not directly debate Democrats’ proposals to cut off funding for more troops in Iraq but asked them to let him try his new plan.

While they held out little hope of changing minds on Iraq, White House aides said the president’s ideas on domestic policy could appeal to Democrats because they were offered in a spirit of bipartisan cooperation.

The biggest previously undisclosed initiative announced Tuesday night was Bush’s proposal to reduce U.S. gasoline consumption by 20 percent by 2017, largely by stimulating the growth of ethanol and other alternative fuels but also by increasing fuel efficiency of automobiles. Bush has spoken in past State of the Union addresses about his desire to break U.S. dependency on foreign oil and last year declared that “America is addicted to oil,” but his speech Tuesday night represented his most aggressive effort to curtail the habit.

The president proposed an ambitious campaign to expand the use of ethanol, methanol, hydrogen and other alternative fuels by requiring oil refineries to use 35 billion gallons of renewable and alternative fuels by 2017, a fivefold increase in the current standard. Aides calculated that doing so would displace about 15 percent of projected gasoline use.

Bush also asked Congress to overhaul mileage standards for automobiles. Rather than forcing automakers to raise fuel-efficiency standards for new cars across the board, Bush is pushing for flexibility to set different standards for different sizes and makes so manufacturers do not make smaller cars that are less safe. Officials forecast raising fuel standards by 4 percent a year, which would reduce overall gasoline use by 5 percent by 2017.

Although Bush did not embrace any plans specifically to combat greenhouse gases that cause global warming, as some in Washington anticipated, aides argued that the net effect of using less gasoline would curb the biggest source of such emissions. Bush also announced plans to double the capacity of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to 1.5 billion barrels by 2027 to further insulate the United States from short-term disruptions in foreign oil supplies.

Democrats complained that Bush’s plans contain significant loopholes or are not tough enough.