President Bush on Monday said Iraq has reached “a turning point” on the road to democracy, even as critics mocked the three-year anniversary of Bush?s speech in front of a “Mission Accomplished” banner.
“What we have begun to see now is the emergence of a unity government to represent the wishes of the Iraqi people,” Bush told reporters in the Rose Garden. “We believe this is a turning point for the Iraqi citizens, and it?s a new chapter in our partnership.”
Bush gave the upbeat assessment after meeting with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who just returned from Iraq. In a closed-door session at the White House, the trio discussed the emergence of a unity government after months of political deadlock in Iraq.
“This new government is going to represent a new start for the Iraqi people,” Bush said as Rice and Rumsfeld stood silently at his side. “It?s a government that understands they?ve got serious challenges ahead of them.”
The remarks came exactly three years after Bush helped pilot a Navy jet onto an aircraft carrier in the immediate aftermath of the U.S.-led Operation Iraqi Freedom. The carrier was draped with a banner that read “MissionAccomplished,” which Bush used as the backdrop for a high-profile speech.
On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., called that episode “a public relations stunt gone horribly wrong.”
“Since President Bush rendered his judgment of ?mission accomplished,? more than 2,200 Americans have lost their lives, about 20,000 have been wounded, many hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars have been expended,” he said. “And now Iraq is engaged in a civil war.”
According to the Department of Defense, 2,400 American service members have died, all but 140 of them after Bush?s May 2003 announcement, and 17,500 have been wounded.
White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said such rhetoric “really does nothing to help advance our goal of achieving victory in Iraq.”
“There are some Democrats that refuse to recognize the important milestone achieved by the formation of a national unity government,” the spokesman told reporters. “And there?s an effort simply to distract attention away from the real progress that is being made by misrepresenting and distorting the past.”
McClellan also rejected a proposal by Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., to partition Iraq along Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite lines.
“A partition government with regional security forces and a weak central government is something that no Iraqi leader has proposed and that the Iraqi people have not supported,” he said.
