Bush's speech seen as gamble

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration today will launch a public-relations counteroffensive against critics of the Iraq war, hoping to stem fast-eroding public support for the war and restore confidence in the president's ability to bring the conflict to a successful conclusion.

In a high-profile address at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., this morning, President Bush will speak in detail about the new strength of Iraqi military forces, even naming individual Iraqis who have contributed to the fighting, according to a White House official who declined to be identified. Bush will focus on "the ability of Iraqi forces to defend themselves and their country," the primary prerequisite for reducing the number of U.S. forces, the official said.

At the same time, the president will continue to argue against setting arbitrary timetables or making a sudden withdrawal, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

The speech, with its emphasis on improved fighting capabilities of Iraqi troops, is viewed by analysts as an attempt to offer evidence that the administration has a viable plan for Iraq in the face of criticism from Republicans, as well as Democrats, that the war has been mishandled.

But the experts also see a calculated risk being taken by the White House — that the highly suspect Iraqi military now can become the main protective force for the nascent government in Baghdad. That assessment is widely disputed by military specialists inside and outside the administration.

After all, Army Gen. John Abizaid, the senior U.S. commander in the Middle East, told a Senate hearing two months ago that only one of the 100 Iraqi military battalions formed over the previous two years was fully trained, equipped and capable of operating independently.

The timing of the administration's move, analysts believe, is based in part on the need to counter domestic political pressure and shore up Bush's sagging poll numbers. But they say it also is motivated by the need to head off two potentially greater risks: a loss of public and congressional backing so precipitous that it might compel a politically devastating hasty pullout and the need to prevent the serious damage to America's all-volunteer military that could occur with an open-ended commitment in Iraq.

About 157,000 U.S. troops are in Iraq, a higher-than-usual number to provide security for the Dec. 15 elections. Already, the Pentagon has said it plans to reduce that number back to the usual level of 138,000.

While Bush's speech constitutes the centerpiece of the White House move, the administration is responding on other fronts as well.

A few hours before the speech, in time for the morning television news shows, the White House is scheduled to release a "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq," which outlines how the administration plans to defeat the insurgency that has claimed more than 2,100 American lives, untold Iraqi lives and stunted the Iraqi economy.

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld weighed in with praise for Iraq's military forces, now numbering 212,000 troops.

"The people who have been denigrating the Iraqi security forces are flat wrong," he said at a Pentagon news conference. "They've been wrong from the beginning. They're doing a darn good job, and they're doing an increasingly better job every day, every week, every month."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Fox News last week that Iraqi forces would "fairly soon" be capable of defending their country. She repeated the assessment in Tuesday's USA Today.

The administration's media offensive on Iraq comes days after the White House was surprised by a call for an immediate pullout of U.S. forces by Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., a decorated Marine veteran who had been a leading war supporter.

For Bush and his presidency, the stakes in timing any withdrawal of U.S. forces correctly could hardly be higher. A failure in Iraq would bring turmoil to a crucially important part of the world, constitute a setback in the administration's fight against militant Islam and likely undermine the president's drive to spread democracy through the Middle East.

While the president, senior Cabinet members and some military commanders now say Iraqi forces are ready to shoulder more responsibility, others are far from certain. Inside the Pentagon, some experts say 2006 is far too optimistic a goal for turning over a large part of Iraq's security to local forces, arguing that early failures of the training mission ensure that it will be at least until 2007 before Iraqi troops can assume control in most of the country.

"Because of the lost year ... we've only been serious about this for a year and a half," said one Defense Department official who has made repeated trips to Iraq to study the training mission. "It's going to be at least another year and a half before you will start to see some good results."

This official, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue, was referring to an ill-fated initial training effort that was delegated to private contractors who tended to concentrate more on the quantity, rather than the quality, of recruits.

The official said that on his last trip to Iraq, he spoke to several dozen U.S. battalion commanders about the readiness of Iraqi units and that, almost to a man, those commanders estimated that it would be one or two more years before Iraqi troops would be capable of taking over.

During especially difficult combat operations last year in and around the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, many Iraqi units simply melted away once fighting began.

Defense consultant Gary Anderson, a retired Marine colonel who worked with then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz during the early post-invasion period, warned that some key military skills could not be rushed.

"You don't grow leadership overnight," he said.

Anderson also worried that those evaluating Iraqi forces now could feel required to inflate the readiness of Iraqi units in order to justify a drawdown of U.S. forces.

"Any time you have categories like this, there's going to be pressure to inflate the numbers," he said.

Los Angeles Times reporters Paul Richter, Edwin Chen, Ashraf Khalil and John Daniszewski contributed to this report; McClellan's comments and details on U.S. and Iraqi troop levels were reported by Newsday.