Despite violence, Bush stresses progress

DAYTON, Ohio – The images from Baghdad and Basra bristled with explosions, burning buildings, angry street protests, rocket smoke wafting from the Green Zone. The words from Dayton were “remarkable” and “victory” and “rebirth.”

“Normalcy,” President Bush said, “is returning back to Iraq.”

The juxtaposition of image and sound crisply illustrated Bush’s challenge in pleading for more patience from his own weary public for a war that has now surpassed five years and 4,000 American dead. Bush came here Thursday to make the case that Iraq has made impressive progress in political reconciliation in recent months even as his argument was overshadowed by the latest outbreak of violence.

Bush cast the battling in Basra not as a setback but as more fodder for optimism, a sign that Iraq’s leaders were ready to challenge the militias that dominate the southern city with a tough security crackdown designed and led by their own forces.

“The enemy will try to fill the TV screens with violence,” the president said. “But the ultimate result will be this: Terrorists and extremists in Iraq will know they have no place in a free and democratic society.”

Meanwhile, Bush advisers in Washington held a series of meetings to assess what appeared to be a rapidly deteriorating situation in southern Iraq as three rival Shiite militias battled for political power. A decisive victory for Iraqi security forces could bolster Bush’s position heading into congressional hearings on the war next month, they said, but they expressed nervousness that the operation would upset a fragile cease-fire with radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr that has been a major factor in falling violence in recent months.

The Basra operation and its ripple effects complicated Bush’s political task at home at a sensitive moment. The president came here to deliver the third and final speech hailing recent successes in Iraq before Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker return to provide a report to Congress on April 8 and 9. Petraeus has recommended a pause in troop withdrawals after the extra combat brigades that Bush sent last year leave this summer, and the president has been laying the political ground for adopting that approach.

The White House plan did not envision rockets raining down and killing Americans in the same fortified complex that Vice President Dick Cheney visited just last week. Bush came to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to talk about the political and economic progress he sees in Iraq, fruits in his view of the troop buildup. He noted that the Iraqi legislature has passed a national budget, a pension law, legislation setting provincial elections and a measure allowing mid-level members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party back into government.

“By any reasonable measure, the legislative achievements in Baghdad over the past four months have been remarkable,” he said, acknowledging that more needs to be done, most prominently a law governing Iraq’s oil industry.

Bush pointed to the proliferation of soccer games, community organizations and a five-kilometer race along once-perilous streets in Anbar . He praised what he called bottom-up reconciliation among Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds tired of conflict, part of what he called “the rebirth of Iraqi civil society.”

While it has been slow, “it is not foot-dragging,” Bush said, citing recent comments by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. “Some members of Congress decided the best way to encourage progress in Baghdad was to criticize and threaten Iraq’s leaders while they’re trying to work out their differences,” Bush said, with warplanes flanking him and an unmanned Predator drone suspended from the ceiling and pointed right at him. “But hectoring was not what they needed. What they needed was security, and that is what the surge has provided.”

Democrats were unconvinced. “Once again today, President Bush painted a rosy picture of the continuing war in Iraq that is divorced from the reality on the ground,” said House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (Md.). He added: “The reality is rockets continue to rain down on the fortified Green Zone … Basra has fallen into chaos, violence and bloodshed, and car and suicide bombings continue to kill scores of innocent Iraqis almost daily.”