Bush Points to Signs of Success in Iraq

CLEVELAND —  Three years after the United States launched the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, President Bush said Monday that the overhauled American strategy of clearing insurgents from individual cities and then using Iraqi and U.S. forces to rebuild was succeeding.

As an example, Bush cited the city of Tall Afar, Iraq, which U.S. forces abandoned in the autumn of 2004 after successfully battling insurgents, only to see the fighters return after two months.

But with renewed military effort, followed by an effort to rebuild civic structures and hold elections, the insurgents have become “marginalized,” Bush said.

“The strategy is working,” the president said.

The speech was the second of at least three that the president is delivering to mark the anniversary of the start of the war.

Each is intended to draw attention to one aspect of the conflict that, according to the administration, demonstrates that the United States is meeting its goals there -- the daily examples of chaos and death notwithstanding.

Facing polls that increasingly indicate Americans are turning away from their earlier support for the invasion and war, Bush acknowledged that the images of bombings, executions and other attacks on Iraqi civilians were horrific.

“Nobody likes beheadings,” the president said.

And he said the signs of progress -- children at play, shops reopening -- were “not easy to capture in a short clip on the evening news.” They are not as dramatic, he said, as a roadside bomb or the destruction of a mosque.

“In the face of continued reports about killings and reprisals, I understand how some Americans have had their confidence shaken,” he said.

But with the new control over Tall Afar and other towns and cities, “most of the country has remained relatively peaceful,” Bush said, referring to areas outside the most populous -- and violent -- center of the nation.

The president’s audience, gathered at midday at a downtown hotel, was the City Club of Cleveland, a nonpartisan organization founded in 1912.

Audience members responded with only occasional displays of enthusiasm, interrupting his speech with applause for the first time nearly 28 minutes after he began speaking, when Bush said: “The decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision.”

The president spoke for about 30 minutes, then answered questions for nearly an hour.

For a president whose public appearances have often been choreographed, the questions proved penetrating and critical.

The first was whether Bush agreed with “prophetic Christians” who see the war in Iraq as an early sign of the apocalypse. The president stammered, laughed nervously and said: “First I’d heard of that.”

To a question about false premises for going to war -- that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction, that it was buying materials for nuclear weapons and that it was becoming a haven for terrorists -- Bush replied: “I asked the very same question: Where did we go wrong on intelligence?”

A high school student, asserting that the war was costing $19,600 per household, wondered whether that money could be put to better use as college tuition aid. “We can do more than one thing at a time,” Bush replied.

Elsewhere, the war’s critics also took note of the anniversary.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, noted that the invasion “got rid of a brutal dictator. And that’s good.”

“But we may be on the verge of trading him for chaos and a new terror haven in the Middle East,” Biden said, adding that such an outcome was increasingly likely “because of the dangerous incompetence of this administration.”

The president’s series of speeches reflect a twofold White House campaign: to lower expectations and at the same time hold out prospects for success. In Tall Afar -- which Bush said was roughly equivalent in population to the slightly more than 200,000 of nearby Akron -- the president pointed to what he saw as evidence of that outcome.

Rather than expelling terrorists and then leaving town, as it did in 2004, the United States in 2005 executed a policy of “clear, hold and build,” Bush said.

Military units ejected insurgents from the city and surrounding towns, and U.S.-trained Iraqi troops stayed behind to hold the city and work with local leaders to rebuild the economy.

Tall Afar, 35 miles from the Syrian border, is made up of dozens of tribes reflecting the country’s ethnic and religious groups, although most in the city are Sunnis, Bush said.

He described the reign of insurgents between the 2004 and 2005 U.S. campaigns.

“The savagery of the terrorists and insurgents who controlled Tall Afar is really hard for Americans to imagine,” the president said, recounting previously reported atrocities, including one in which a young boy was kidnapped from a hospital and killed, his body booby-trapped to explode when his father came to retrieve it on a roadside.

After ejecting insurgents a second time, the city became more peaceful and productive, Bush said.

Participation in elections surged, with the number of voters growing from 32,000 in January 2005, when rebels were in control, to 175,000 last October and December, Bush said.

By citing such examples, Bush is seeking to refute the sense that the United States is slipping deeper into a sinkhole.

However, that view has been reinforced by the increasing displays of sectarian violence dividing Sunni and Shiite Muslims.

In a CNN/USA Today/Gallup national survey released last week, 55% of Americans said that chaos and civil war were the most likely outcomes in Iraq; 40% said they expected that a stable government would be formed.

Only 37% of those polled said they believed the war in Iraq had been worth the cost -- a sharp decline from 46% in January. Of those surveyed, 60% said the war had not been worth the cost, equaling the highest percentage Gallup has recorded on that question.

Times staff writer Louise Roug in Baghdad contributed to this report.