WASHINGTON - With the military campaign in Iraq less than a week old, Bush administration officials Tuesday defended themselves Tuesday against criticism that their war plan was inadequate and their statements had fueled public perceptions that the war would end quickly.
With allied troops meeting Iraqi resistance on the battlefield and the delivery of humanitarian goods delayed, a series of public opinion polls show that American optimism over the war's progress has dropped sharply since the war began.
In an appearance Tuesday at the Pentagon, President Bush said the U.S.-led invasion force "is on a steady advance."
"We cannot know the duration of this war," Bush said, "yet we know its outcome: We will prevail."
At a news briefing later in the day, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer cited three speeches in which Bush mentioned that the war could last longer than many expected. Each of the speeches was given on or after March 17, the night Bush first told the nation that the United States was abandoning diplomacy and preparing for war.
Yet the day before Bush spoke, Vice President Dick Cheney, appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press," said elements of the elite Republican Guard would likely "want to avoid conflict with U.S. forces and are likely to step aside."
For months, administration officials have suggested that much of Saddam Hussein's army might surrender rather than fight and painted images of Iraqis celebrating in the streets as the invasion force toppled Saddam. Still, Fleischer said, "The American (people) have fully understood all the way along that there is risk, that there is sacrifice as the nation prepared for war."
At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Army Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, fended off questions about whether the Pentagon's portrayal of its war plan as "shock and awe" helped raise public expectations that the war would end quickly.
"Is it possible that someone might have said something that led some person to believe" that the war would be quick? "I suppose so," Rumsfeld said. "But why would we have put in ... the hundreds of thousands of people to go do this task if we thought it was going to be over in five minutes?"
Myers said the intense, 24-hour news coverage, created in part by the Pentagon's decision to allow hundreds of U.S. and foreign journalists to travel with battle units, "lends this perception that it's been going on a long time and a lot is happening."
"But (in) the big scope of things, we're on track, we're on plan," Myers said.
In recent days, military analysts have criticized the administration's war plan as deploying a force that was too small and did not fully account for Iraqi resistance. Over a period of just a few days, a series of public opinion polls found American optimism about the war's progress falling off.
The latest survey, conducted by the Pew Research Center and released Tuesday, found that the number of Americans who thought the war was going well dropped from 71 percent on Friday to 38 percent on Monday, a period during which the nation saw its first battlefield deaths. The pessimism has not significantly affected overall support for the war, which remains at about 70 percent in most polls.
Bush will travel Wednesday to Tampa, Fla., to meet with officers at Central Command, which is running the war in Iraq. The president then will meet with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, his top ally in the war, during an overnight stay at Camp David. The two are expected to discuss the progress of the war and the role the United Nations would play in rebuilding and stabilizing the country if Saddam is deposed.
White House aides said that after more than a week of near-isolation, Bush will begin to make more frequent trips around the country to rally Americans behind the war.
In London, Blair also found himself on the defensive Tuesday over the war's progress but said, "The progress on the way to Baghdad has been exactly what we planned and anticipated."
The fact that Iraqi civilians have not uniformly welcomed the invasion force, as U.S. and British officials had suggested they would, is no indication that they oppose the overthrow of Saddam, Blair said.
Their reluctance, Blair and Myers said, may be due in part to their feeling betrayed by the failure of the U.S.-led coalition in the 1991 Persian Gulf war to press the war to Baghdad and eliminate Saddam. It was Bush's father, former President George Bush, who decided at that time to halt the military operation, saying the U.N. resolution under which he was acting did not allow for the removal of Saddam.
"You cannot expect ordinary Iraqi people who have lived for years under the boot of Saddam and who have twice before been let down, I'm afraid, by allied forces, to be confident that they're able to come out and express their views until they are sure that Saddam's regime is gone," Blair told reporters in London.
Shortly after the Persian Gulf war, Bush's father suggested the United States would help Iraqi opposition groups if they sought to overthrow Saddam. But that assistance never materialized, and the opposition groups who rose up against him were slaughtered by Saddam's military. That experience helps explain why anti-Saddam forces in Iraq have so far been reluctant to assist the invasion force, Myers said at the Pentagon.
"If you remember in '91, hundreds of thousands were killed because they thought they had a chance for a popular uprising and the backing didn't materialize the way they thought it was going to materialize," Myers said. "And so I think we have, rightly so, some very cautious people."
© 2003, Chicago Tribune.
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