BAGHDAD — On an Iraq trip shrouded in secrecy and marred by dissent, President George W. Bush on Sunday during a news conference hailed progress in the war that defines his presidency. But on a stop today in Afghanistan, he got a firsthand look at the deteriorating situation in the seven-year-old war.
The U.S. president visited the Iraqi capital just 37 days before he hands the war off to his successor, Barack Obama, who has pledged to end it. The president wanted to highlight a drop in violence in a nation still riven by ethnic strife and to celebrate a recent U.S.-Iraq security agreement, which calls for U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq by the end of 2011.
“The war is not over,” Bush said, adding that “it is decisively on its way to being won.”
Nearly 150,000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq fighting a war that is intensely disliked across the globe. More than 4,209 members of the U.S. military have died in the conflict, which has cost U.S. taxpayers $576 billion since it began five years and nine months ago.
Polls show most Americans believe the U.S. erred in invading Iraq in 2003. Bush ordered the nation into war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq while citing intelligence claiming the Mideast nation harbored weapons of mass destruction. The weapons were never found, the intelligence was discredited, Bush’s credibility with U.S. voters plummeted and Hussein was captured and executed.
Al-Maliki praised postwar progress: “Today, Iraq is moving forward in every field.”
In Afghanistan today, Bush spoke to U.S. soldiers and Marines stationed in Afghanistan at a hangar on the tarmac at Bagram Air Base.
The rally for over a thousand military personnel took place in the dark, cold predawn hours — it was about 5:30 a.m. local time when the president strode into the hangar to loud cheers.
“Afghanistan is a dramatically different country than it was eight years ago,” he said. “We are making hopeful gains.”
Bush’s stop in Afghanistan was his first in more than 2 ½ years and only the second of his presidency. His visit comes at a time when military violence is at its highest level since the invasion.
In Afghanistan, there are about 31,000 U.S. troops and commanders have called for up to 20,000 more. The fight is especially difficult in southern Afghanistan, a stronghold of the Taliban where violence has risen sharply this year.
Earlier in Iraq, Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki signed a ceremonial copy of the new security agreement. The U.S.-Iraqi security pact calls for all American troops to be withdrawn by the end of 2011, in two stages.
The first stage begins next year, when U.S. troops pull back from Baghdad and other Iraqi cities by the end of June. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Saturday that some U.S. troops will remain in Iraqi cities.
After the news conference, the president took a 15-minute helicopter ride over Baghdad to Camp Victory. Telling hundreds of troops he was “heading into retirement,” Bush blamed Hussein for the 2003 invasion and said, “America is safer and more secure” than it was before the war.
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