WASHINGTON - President Bush will address the nation from the deck of a homebound aircraft carrier Thursday night to declare an end to major military operations in Iraq, but he will stop short of declaring victory or setting a deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
Bush will fly to meet the USS Abraham Lincoln while it is hundreds of miles from the California coast to announce in an 9 p.m. EDT televised address that major combat in Iraq has ended - about six weeks after he first launched the U.S.-led invasion.
White House aides said Bush would acknowledge that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein - the top two targets of the invasion - remain unaccounted for. But most of the president's speech will focus on progress made in Iraq, and in the war on terrorism in general.
"This is a significant moment in our history in which the president, in a unique way, will be able to thank the men and women who put themselves in harm's way," Bush's communications director, Dan Bartlett, said Wednesday.
Bush will not formally declare the war over because that would trigger international laws requiring the release of all prisoners of war. It would also hinder the hunt for Hussein and members of his regime, which would be seen as a continuation of hostilities, officials said.
"The president knows that while major combat operations have ended and while the next phase has begun with the reconstruction of Iraq, there continue to be threats to the security and the safety of the American people, and he will describe that," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
Still, Bush will essentially be declaring an end to the war in Iraq and shifting the focus of the mission to the reconstruction of that nation and the establishment of a democratic government.
Bush's declaration will allow the president to turn more of his attention to domestic issues, particularly the ailing economy, which ranks higher among public concerns in a series of recent polls than does the threat of another terrorist attack.
"It's a pivoting point for all of us," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said of the speech after meeting with Bush Wednesday.
Bush and House and Senate leaders met to discuss the domestic agenda he will press in Congress. Topping his list of priorities is $550 billion in tax cuts that he said are needed to jump-start the economy.
Despite Bush's rising popularity during the Iraqi war, a number of his domestic initiatives, including the tax cuts, have met with resistance on Capitol Hill, from Republicans as well as Democrats. Key Senate Republicans have threatened to slash the tax cut plan - which started out at $726 billion - to $350 billion over 10 years, a limit Bush declared unacceptable.
Other Bush priorities for his re-election campaign next year, including funding for AIDS prevention in Africa and a number of judicial nominations, also have suffered setbacks in Congress.
Bush had said he would not declare an end to major combat operations in Iraq until Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of the invasion force, had assured him that this was the case. Franks gave the president that assurance Tuesday, administration officials said.
To allow the president to focus on the positive aspects of the Iraqi operation, the administration dispatched Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage on Wednesday to deal with the issue of why the United States has been unsuccessful in finding evidence of Iraq's biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs.
"I want to be clear here today that I am extraordinarily confident that Iraq had those capabilities," Armitage said in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington.
"We are finding now that the capabilities were even more dispersed and disguised than we had thought," Armitage said. "...It's going to take us months to find this material, but we will find it."
© 2003, Chicago Tribune.
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