WASHINGTON - President Bush said Tuesday that U.S. troops will be in Iraq until after his presidency ends almost three years from now.
Asked at a White House news conference whether there'll come a time when no U.S. forces are in Iraq, he said "that will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq." Pressed on that response, the president said that for him to discuss complete withdrawal would mean he was setting a timetable, which he refuses to do.
Bush's statement flies in the face of U.S. public opinion. A Gallup Poll released Friday found that a clear majority of Americans, 60 percent, think the war isn't worth the costs, 19 percent called for immediately withdrawing U.S. troops, another 35 percent favored a pullout by March 2007 and only 39 percent said troops should remain in Iraq indefinitely. The issue is expected to dominate congressional elections next November.
In the hastily called, 57-minute news conference, the president said he didn't believe that Iraq had tumbled into a civil war and suggested that success stories there are overshadowed by news coverage of dramatic insurgent attacks.
Bush said he disagreed with former interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, who told the British Broadcasting Corp. on Sunday that if the current state of Iraq isn't civil war "then God knows what civil war is."
"Listen, we all recognize that there is violence, that there's sectarian violence," the president said. "But the way I look at the situation is that the Iraqis took a look and decided not to go to civil war."
As evidence, Bush said the Iraqi military hadn't splintered into sectarian factions and that U.S. military and diplomatic officials there didn't view the situation as civil war.
Bush asserted repeatedly that the United States is making progress in Iraq, an argument he has made publicly four days in a row in an apparent effort to rally public opinion. Virtually all recent national polls put the president's job-approval rating in the low to mid-30s, his all-time low range.
For the second straight day, the president stressed that the long campaign to rid the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar of insurgents exemplifies how American efforts are succeeding. But some military experts say Tal Afar isn't a template for success elsewhere in Iraq because the conditions there aren't replicable in most contested areas.
U.S. forces were able to clean out that town of 250,000 people largely because it occupies an isolated area that's only about 2 miles by 2 miles in size. Coalition forces built a sand wall around it, severely limiting access. Then they isolated neighborhoods in which insurgents were concentrated, evacuated them while weeding out suspected insurgents and destroyed pockets of armed resistance. Such tactics aren't feasible in sprawling Baghdad.
Bush acknowledged setbacks in Iraq and warned that more violence will come.
The president also was asked to respond to a weekend opinion column by retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who called on Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to resign, charging that he's "incompetent" and has mismanaged the war in Iraq.
"I think he's done a fine job," Bush said, adding that U.S. military tactics have changed in Iraq to deal with changing circumstances, a tacit admission that earlier occupation policies had failed.
The president also repeatedly recited a string of glowing economic statistics, saying accurately that in terms of growth, jobs, inflation, productivity and household net worth, the U.S. economy is humming along nicely.
Republicans have voiced frustration in this congressional election year that the public isn't giving Bush the usual credit that presidents get during economic good times.
The public still refuses to do so, according to a new Gallup Poll released Tuesday. It found that only one-third of Americans think the economy is "excellent" or "good," while 6 in 10 think it's getting worse. High fuel prices are at least partly to blame.
Joseph L. Galloway contributed to this article.
© 2006 KR Washington Bureau and wire service sources
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