Bush Says The Troops Will Stay

I heard this speech earlier in the day on the radio as I was driving and meant to comment on it before because I find it heartening, even if it isn’t clear yet if the President has the will to follow through on his words.

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – President Bush said on Tuesday the hand of al Qaeda lay behind sectarian violence racking Iraq, and he would not pull troops out “before the mission is complete”.
Bush, speaking in the Baltic republics before a NATO summit, deflected talk of “civil war” — a description which could increase pressure on him to withdraw U.S. forces.
“There is one thing I’m not going to do. I am not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete,” he said in a speech at the University of Latvia.

It seems like all we’ve heard from the media and politicians of late is talk of withdrawal from Iraq. It’s nice to hear the President say, unequivocally, that we will be staying in Iraq to complete our mission.
If the President means what he says, though, he really needs to hammer that point home both to the politicians in Washington D.C. and to the media, because a lot of this talk about withdrawal is his fault to begin with. He fired Rumsfeld right after the election and replaced him with a man, Robert Gates, who has a history of tolerating dictators rather than fighting them for the sake of stability. Granted, the Democrats feeling their oats after their election day victories has been fueling a lot of withdrawal talk as well, but the President hasn’t done much to refute that of late.
If staying in Iraq is what we’re going to do (and that is the President’s decision alone unless Congress should deauthorize the war, which is unlikely) then the President needs to make that clear both to Americans and our enemies. Because all this withdrawal talk and uncertainty about the future of the mission in Iraq is doing nothing but make our soldiers (and Americans in general) question the validity of the mission. And it’s emboldening our enemies to keep up their attacks, too. As I’ve said before, the only hope the terrorists have for victory in Iraq is to undermine our will to fight with small daily attacks that will be hyped endlessly in the media. If the terrorists get the idea that we’re something less than devoted to our mission they’re only going to keep going for the jugular.
So please, Mr. President, make it clear to the world that America isn’t about to be driven from Iraq and make it clear both with words and action.