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US President George W. Bush has pleaded with wary Americans to give his unpopular Iraq strategy a chance, warning a US defeat could unleash an “epic battle” that would engulf the entire Middle East.
“For America, this is a nightmare scenario. For the enemy, this is the objective,” Bush said in his annual State of the Union speech, striking a more defiant than downbeat tone despite his mounting political woes.
“Our country is pursuing a new strategy in Iraq, and I ask you to give it a chance to work,” said the president, who gave no ground to his critics during a prime-time televised address that will shape his last two years in office.
Fighting to save his presidency and derail pending congressional action against his Iraq plan, he also laid out a handful of domestic policies to slash US oil consumption and pollution, expand health care, and reform immigration.
But his chief goal was to win a reprieve for his decision to send 21,500 more US soldiers to Iraq from a skeptical US public and an increasingly hostile US Congress led by opposition Democrats for the first time in a dozen years.
With his poll numbers mired at record lows, and many Americans dubious that the war launched in March 2003 can be won, Bush insisted that: “On this day, at this hour, it is still within our power to shape the outcome of this battle.”
“So let us find our resolve, and turn events towards victory,” he said, as lawmakers prepared to take up symbolic legislation sharply critical of deepening US military involvement in the war.
Democratic Senator James Webb, chosen to give his party's rejoinder, said the US public had “patiently endured a mismanaged war for nearly four years” but that now, “We need a new direction.”
Webb vowed “not one step back” from fighting global terrorism, and ruled out “a precipitous withdrawal that ignores the possibility of further chaos,” but pushed for more regional diplomacy, taking steps to get US troops “off the streets of Iraq
