Los Angeles Times
President Bush’s latest plan for Iraq has the feel of an overdue high school book report. It looks nice, reads well and is persuasive in parts. If only he had handed it in on time.
(T)he core of Bush’s speech – the reason to maintain at least some flicker of hope – was an absolute-Jfinal-we’re-really-serious-this-time ultimatum to the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
Chicago Tribune
(President) Bush faces skepticism from Congress and from weary Americans. A few weeks ago, former Secretary of State James Baker, a leader of the Iraq Study Group, noted that one word didn’t appear much, if at all, in his group’s report: victory.
Wednesday night, the president made clear that “victory” is still in his vocabulary. It should be. Americans need a democratic Iraqi government, able to defend itself from extremists, in that difficult neighborhood. Iraq’s leaders need to be much more aggressive in securing and building the new nation that they and their people need just as much.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Stability is worth one more try. If the civil war intensifies or draws in neighbors to a regional war, Iraq will be a greater threat to U.S. national security than it ever was before the invasion.
But (President) Bush’s hail is ignoring or giving short shrift to some of the more clear-eyed ideas from the Iraq Study Group: Beef up training Iraqi security forces, and do aggressive diplomacy with Iran and Syria.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Now that President Bush has acknowledged error and laid out his new strategy for Iraq (one that sounds suspiciously similar to past strategy), the billion(s)-dollar question is: What should Congress do about its disagreements over this “shift”?
It should exercise both its power of the purse and its oversight responsibilities. Initially, it should do as Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy proposes and withhold funds for any troop buildup without specific congressional authorization – though continuing to fund existing troops. And it should do so quickly.
Washington Post
President Bush is right to recognize that U.S. strategy in Iraq is not working and to seek a different policy. He is right to insist that the United States cannot afford to abandon the mission and to reject calls for an early withdrawal. But the new plan for the war Mr. Bush outlined Wednesday night is very risky.
The president must do more to convince the country that the sacrifice he is asking of American soldiers is necessary. And if Iraqis do not deliver on their own commitments in the coming weeks, he must reconsider his strategy – and suspend the U.S. reinforcements.
New York Times
President Bush told Americans last night that failure in Iraq would be a disaster. The disaster is Bush’s war, and he has already failed. Wednesday night was his chance to stop offering more fog and be honest with the nation, and he did not take it.
Americans needed to hear a clear plan to extricate U.S. troops from the disaster that Bush created. What they got was more gauzy talk of victory in the war on terrorism and of creating a “young democracy” in Iraq. In other words, a way for this president to run out the clock and leave his mess for the next one.