Grim Outlook Seen in West Iraq Without More Troops and Aid

Attention: Kids attending the Jesus Camp. Your "Man of God" ("Man of War"?) in the White House needs you. We can use kids as young as 12. Get your holy booty over to West Iraq and fight for Gawd and your Chimperor.

War without end. Amen.


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/12/washington/12assess.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

WASHINGTON, Sept. 11 — Five years ago, with the World Trade Center and the Pentagon still burning, President Bush faced the difficult task of preparing a shocked nation for war against a single enemy, one that had attacked American soil.

On Monday evening he faced a different, more daunting challenge: to make the case to a skeptical nation that stabilizing and democratizing Iraq was now the most important element of winning that same battle.

For in the end, a speech that began as a commemoration of one of the most searing and painful moments in American history became something else. For much of his 17-minute address from the Oval Office, Mr. Bush in effect acknowledged that his political standing and the success of his avowed mission to make the world safe from Islamic terrorism now rests on victory in Iraq, a mission his critics say was a deadly detour from the task he set out five years ago.

Mr. Bush’s aides acknowledged beforehand that it would not be easy. The country Mr. Bush faced on Monday was very different from the shocked, angry but unified nation he addressed from the same chair 1,826 days before. Iraq and its aftermath had changed everything, dividing Americans who five years ago had largely unified around Mr. Bush’s strategy, cutting his approval ratings in half and leaving in its wake questions about whether the president had made an ugly confrontation with Islamic extremists worse.

On a day when the White House said it wanted to focus on the victims of 9/11 and their still-grieving survivors, Mr. Bush nonetheless put Iraq front and center. “I am often asked why we are in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks,” he said, midway through his speech. “The answer is that the regime of Saddam Hussein was a clear threat,” he said, and “posed a risk that the world could not afford to take.”

Mr. Bush’s aim was to put the arguments about Iraq into a broader context, to try again to change the minds of most Americans who tell pollsters that Iraq was, in retrospect, a dangerous diversion. Along the way, he has expanded the cast of terror groups and nations that America must defeat to regain its sense of security — not only a diminished Al Qaeda and a resurgent Taliban, but also Iranian mullahs and their Syrian neighbors, regional threats like Hezbollah and Hamas, and the Sunni extremists and the Shia militias that are battling for control of Iraq.

“We are now in the early hours of this struggle between tyranny and freedom,” Mr. Bush said, describing a conflict with no end in sight.

He had to make the argument, he has told visitors to the White House, because five years after the 9/11 attacks he worries that the country no longer views itself as at war. But his new approach has its own risks.

“If you conflate all of our problems into one massive, single enemy, you do not define the enemy properly,” said Lee H. Hamilton, the former co-chairman of the 9/11 commission. “The risk is that you think you can take them all out with a single strategy. And you alienate the sympathizers, the people who we might be able to talk to.”

“And if you don’t define your enemy correctly,” Mr. Hamilton concluded, “you risk getting your strategy wrong.”

That debate over strategy underlies the deeply political element of Mr. Bush’s speech, even though the White House insisted that this anniversary was no moment for politics.

The country is eight weeks away from a critical midterm election, at a time that the war in Iraq and the administration’s policies on detention, domestic wiretapping and interrogation have made foreign policy a more partisan issue than at any other time in decades. Mr. Bush seemed to acknowledge that when he asked Americans to “put aside our differences and work together to meet the test that history has given us.”

He compared the situation now to those faced by Franklin D. Roosevelt in World War II and Harry S. Truman at the dawn of the cold war. But it also had echoes of another era, of a time in 1970 when Richard M. Nixon was urging the country to unify behind a Vietnam War that was expanding into Cambodia.

Mr. Nixon famously warned that night that if “the United States of America acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.”

In the current conflict, Mr. Bush made it clear on Monday evening that while the war might have become more complicated, he believes that the choices remain as stark as they were five years ago.

“Whatever mistakes have been made in Iraq,” he said, nodding to past misjudgments, “the worst mistake would be to think that if we pulled out, the terrorists would leave us alone. They will not leave us alone. They will follow us. The safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad.”

To Mr. Bush’s admirers, this was the Texan president at his Reaganesque best: defining America’s enemies broadly, vowing their defeat and promising to make the spread of freedom his legacy. To his critics, it was Mr. Bush at his most dangerous, approaching the world with little interest in how America is perceived and lumping together its many opponents, even if their agendas and interests are quite different.

“It can be a little spooky,” said David M. Kennedy, the Stanford historian whom Mr. Bush has consulted during his periodic Oval Office meetings with outsiders. “It’s a war without end, in which our enemies grow like cancerous cells, regrowing as soon as we kill them off.”