Bush rejects early pullout from Iraq
Foreign Desk Report

RIGA (Latvia)—President Bush, under pressure to change direction in Iraq, said Tuesday he will not be persuaded by any calls to withdraw American troops before the country is stabilized.
“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,” he said in a speech setting the stage for high-stakes meetings with the Iraqi prime minister later this week. “We can accept nothing less than victory for our children and our grandchildren.”
A bipartisan panel on Iraq is finalizing recommendations on Iraq. The group led by former Secretary of State James Baker III and former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., is expected to present recommendations to Bush next month.
The New York Times reported Monday that the commissioners are expected to debate the feasibility of withdrawal timetables. Recent U.S. elections added fuel to the argument from Democrats that U.S. soldiers need to come home. But Bush has resisted that, even while projecting the need for a different approach.
“We’ll continue to be flexible and we’ll make the changes necessary to succeed,” the president said. US President George W. Bush has ruled out an early withdrawal of US troops from Iraq “before the mission is complete”, amid growing pressure for him to bring the forces home. “One thing I won’t do, I am not going to pull the troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete,” he said Tuesday in a speech given on his arrival in the Latvian capital for a NATO summit. The drubbing in midterm elections earlier this month for Bush’s Republican Party was in large part due to voter misgivings over the continuing presence of US troops in Iraq, and the president is under pressure to change course. “We will continue to be flexible and we will make the changes necessary to succeed,” Bush told an audience at Riga’s university.
In an effort to be seen as getting to grips with the spiraling violence in Iraq, Bush was due to travel on Wednesday to Jordan for a meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. “We will discuss the situation on the ground in his country,” Bush said. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said Monday Iraq was “almost” at civil war and Jordan’s King Abdullah II has warned that it is one of three Middle East countries on the brink of such a conflict. Bush is also awaiting ideas from the Iraq Study Group, a high-level panel of policy experts he set up earlier this year under former secretary of state James Baker to re-examine the war plan.
On Monday, Bush’s National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley acknowledged that the conflict in Iraq had entered a “new phase”, marked by spiralling violence.
But Hadley held back from calling it civil war. “We’re clearly in a new phase, characterized by this increasing sectarian violence,” Hadley said in Estonia, where Bush began his trip to Europe and the Middle East.
In a speech in Tallinn earlier Tuesday, Bush also fended off the civil war label, saying the recent upsurge of violence was part of a spiral of sectarian unrest that began nine months ago. “We have been in this phase for a while,” Bush said.
“The bombing that took place recently was a part of a pattern that has been going on for about nine months,” the US leader said.
“No question it’s tough. There’s a lot of sectarian violence taking place, happening in my opinion because of these attacks by Al-Qaeda, causing people to seek reprisals, and we will work with the Maliki government to defeat these elements,” Bush said.—Agencies