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More than four months after landing on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and declaring an end to major combat in Iraq, US President George W. Bush has to confront the obvious fact that occupation of the country has been more protracted and costly than anticipated.
In his nationally televised address on Monday, Bush asked Congress for US$87 billion in emergency funding to bolster post-war reconstruction in Iraq, and urged more non-US troops to join the problem-plagued occupation of the Middle Eastern country.
With his popular support dropping and his political problems mounting, Bush was attempting to reassure Americans about US strategy in Iraq, just days before the second anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks in New York and Washington, DC.
Bush also tried to convince the world that the terrible toll of rebuilding Iraq is a necessary price to pay in a broader struggle against terrorism, and that "past differences" within the United Nations must not block deployment of more troops from countries other than the United States.
The speech offered glowing rhetoric but few specifics on how to erase the administration's mismanagement of post-war Iraq. Democratic presidential candidate Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut said Bush had outlined "a goal, not a plan."
The speech came amid an increasingly deteriorating situation for the US-led occupation, which has strayed far from the Bush administration's expectations of a quick, easy transition to Iraqi self-government.
A string of car bombings last month which killed more than 100 people, including a leading Shi'ite Muslim cleric and the UN special envoy, have fuelled serious public doubts over the administration's post-war strategy.
The number of US troops killed in Iraq since May 1, when Bush declared an end to major combat, has already surpassed the total killed during the height of the war. In all, 287 US soldiers have died in the Iraq War as of September 8, 149 of them since May 1.
The rising number of casualties reflects the resistance that US forces continue to meet four months after Saddam Hussein was ousted from power. And the slow pace and mounting costs reinforce the perception that the Bush administration is leading the United States into a new quagmire.
Calling Iraq the "central front" for the terrorist threat, Bush said the war on terrorism that began with the September 11 attacks could not be won without success in Iraq.
He blamed the violence on Saddam loyalists and an influx of foreign "al-Qaida-type" fighters and said some of the attackers are "foreign terrorists who have come to Iraq to pursue their war on America and other free nations."
However, US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice acknowledged on Sunday strong evidence of an al-Qaida presence in Iraq was lacking.
The speech made no mention of the US failure to find any of Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction, which was used to justify the invasion without the UN's blessing. The absence of any evidence of weapons of mass destruction has also been a continuing problem for the Bush administration, whose credibility about the rationale for going to war has been repeatedly challenged.
Particularly notable was Bush's call for a draft United Nations resolution to mandate a larger multinational force to share the burden of reconstruction.
He said the United States cannot succeed in Iraq without greater involvement of the UN, which was bypassed by Washington at the very beginning of war.
However, the US president did not mention to what extent the UN should be in charge of rebuilding the country.
Bush's call for UN involvement was stated in declarative, not conciliatory, language. Members have "the responsibility to help," he said.
The speech indicated Bush's initial go-it-alone policy has become his administration's biggest vulnerability, and it is wrong to link the war on terrorism with the United States' strategy in Iraq.
(Xinhua News Agency September 10, 2003)
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