Bush criticizes Iraqi troops who leave posts
Admits insurgency taking toll, but says war coverage skewed
WASHINGTON -- President Bush yesterday criticized Iraqi forces who have abandoned their posts in battle and declined to predict when US troops might leave Iraq.
One day after car bombs in Iraq killed more than 60 people, Bush said at a year-end news conference that too much coverage of the war has focused on the bad news. "Fifteen of the 18 provinces are relatively stable," the president said.
At the same time, Bush said in a reference to insurgents' bomb attacks, "But no question about it, the bombers are having an effect. You know, these people are targeting innocent Iraqis. They're trying to shake the will of the Iraqi people and, frankly, trying to shake the will of the American people. And you know, car bombs that destroy young children or car bombs that indiscriminately bomb in religious sites are effective propaganda tools."
Bush pointedly criticized those Iraqi forces who have left their positions during military operations.
"I would call the results mixed in terms of . . . Iraqi units who are willing to fight," Bush said. "There have been some cases where when the heat got on, they left the battlefield. That's unacceptable. Iraq will never secure itself if they have troops that, when the heat gets on, they leave the battlefield. I fully understand that. On the other hand, there were some really fine units in Fallujah, for example, [and] in Najaf, that did their duty."
Bush did not cite an example of Iraqis fleeing their posts, but one instance occured in November in Mosul, when much of the Iraqi police force there fled during an operation to flush out insurgents. Bush did not make any reference to questions about whether his administration -- and particularly Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld -- had failed to anticipate the need to quickly train large numbers of Iraqi forces. During the presidential campaign, Democratic Senator John F. Kerry repeatedly accused Bush of failing to train enough Iraqis. Asked yesterday to comment on Bush's complaint about the Iraqis, Kerry said in a statement: "The relevant questions today are, simply, what will it take to end the insurgency and enable Iraqi forces to secure their own country, and is the administration doing all they can to get there? That's the test."
Asked whether he could give some kind of estimate when US forces might be withdrawn from Iraq, Bush said he was "wise enough not to give you a specific moment in time, because, sure enough, when we don't achieve it, I'll spend the next press conference . . . answering why we didn't achieve the specific moment."
Bush dismissed calls by several Republican senators that he drop Rumsfeld, saying, "Beneath that rough and gruff no-nonsense demeanor is a good human being who cares deeply about the military and the grief that war causes."
Bush also praised President Vladimir Putin of Russia, who has been chastised by human rights groups for his efforts to consolidate governmental power and suppress independent media. Bush said he has a "good personal relationship" that would continue with Putin. Bush and Putin are set to meet in Slovakia in February, their governments announced yesterday.
Bush's remarks came the same day Freedom House, a US-based organization focused on human rights and civil liberties, placed Russia into the "not free" category for the first time since the Soviet Union dissembled in 1991. The group noted Russia's "dangerous and disturbing trend towards authoritarianism" because of increased Kremlin control of the media and a centralization of government power.
"It's a step backward," said Marshall Goldman, associate director of the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University. "We lose our self-respect [when] we sit by and watch those things" happen.
James Steinberg, a member of the National Security Council in the Clinton administration, said that while the situation in Russia is "a disaster for Russia as well as for us," an argument can be made that "this is not the right time to pick a huge fight with Putin, assuming we can get him to do the right thing." Steinberg is now a scholar at the Brookings Institution. 