President Bush on Tuesday ruled out any specific timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, despite mounting Democratic demands that a pullout begin in four to six months.
“We’ll continue to be flexible and we’ll make the changes necessary to succeed,” Bush told the NATO summit here. “But there’s one thing I’m not going to do: I’m not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete.”
Democrats ranging from Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the incoming chairman of the Armed Services Committee, to Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, who is mulling a presidential bid, have recently called for a withdrawal to begin in four to six months. They describe their plan as a “phased redeployment,” not a specific timetable for withdrawal.
But National Security Adviser Steve Hadley argued Tuesday that the Democratic plan amounts to a specific timetable, even if the end date of the withdrawal has not yet been specified.
“When you say: By such-and-such a date — start, finish, complete, whatever your number is — you step away from what the president believes is the most important thing, which is a conditions-based approach to the issue of troop levels,” Hadley said in response to questions from The Examiner.
Pressed on the point, Hadley said Bush “wants to listen to Democrats in their new role as the majority in both houses of Congress.”
But the president refused to accept assertions by Democrats and NBC News that the violence in Iraq has degenerated into a civil war. Instead, he described the strife as an unsuccessful, months-long attempt by terrorists to instigate a civil war between Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites.
“There’s a lot of sectarian violence taking place, fomented, in my opinion, because of these attacks by al-Qaida, causing people to seek reprisal,” Bush told reporters in Estonia before flying to Latvia.
This drew a sharp rebuke from Democrats.
“While news agencies, numerous experts and many American and Iraqi leaders all agree that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war, President Bush neither acknowledges the facts on the ground nor recognizes that his administration’s failed policies have contributed to the chaos,” said Democratic National Committee spokesman Stacie Paxton. “Ignoring the obvious and blaming al-Qaida won’t bring stability to Iraq and won’t help our troops achieve success.”
Paxton reiterated that Democrats are “united behind a strategy of phased redeployment.”
Such a strategy will not be pursued when Bush meets today with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Jordan. But the president said he will push in general terms for a shifting of “more responsibility to the Iraqi security forces.”
