Bush plays up progress in Iraq, but admits it’s ‘reversible’

President Bush said today that Iraq was making notable economic and political progress, matching what he has presented as improved security conditions, and is assuming greater responsibility for reconstruction while trying to build a modern democracy from “the rubble of three decades of tyranny.”

He attributed much of the improvement to what he presented as the success of the year-long increase in U.S. troops – suggesting a reluctance to reduce the deployment in coming weeks and months.

“The progress isn’t glamorous, but it is important,” Bush said, and any failure to move quickly was not an example of Iraqi “foot-dragging,” but rather a reflection of the “revolutionary” nature of the challenge.

With his top commander in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus, and the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, Ryan Crocker, scheduled to report to Congress next month, the president said he would soon announce his decisions about the next steps in Iraq.

In making those decisions, he said, he would remember that “the progress in Iraq is real, it is substantive, but it is reversible.”

Bush spoke to about 1,000 people, many of them Air Force personnel, at the National Museum of the United States Air Force near Dayton, delivering the third of three speeches over the last three weeks intended to present a broad look at U.S. policy in Iraq, the course of the war, and conditions on the ground, five years after the U.S. invasion.

Flanked by a B-86 bomber of Korean War vintage and an F-22, an aircraft now in the U.S. force, with a Predator drone hanging from the ceiling of a hangar and a B-52 nearby, the president delivered a lengthy, muscular, but low-key speech urging the Americans to turn aside entreaties that it scale down its involvement in Iraq in the face of efforts there by the “world terrorist movement.”

At the same time, he sought to tie Iran to the new violence in Basra, a largely Shiite city near the Iraq-Iran border.

He said the response by the Iraqi government to insurgent strength there demonstrated the readiness, and willingness, of the U.S.-supported government of Prime Minister Nouri Maliki to take on fighters that Bush said were receiving Iranian support.

He said Maliki had made a “bold decision” to wage the battle there with Iraqi security forces, and that Iraqi leadership of the operation showed the progress that government security forces are making while demonstrating to the Iraqi people that “their government is committed to protecting them.”

He said that the mission there will take a while to complete, but the result will be that “terrorists and extremists in Iraq will know they have no place in a free and democratic society.”

Bush cited several examples of what he said were political conditions that have “changed markedly.”

Among them: Tribal sheiks taking part in a political revival; Sunni and Shiite groups, sometimes working together, declaring they are “sick and tired” of the violence there; passage of a pension law allowing tens of thousands of Sunnis to collect retirement benefits; approval of a law allowing mid-level members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party to take part in civil society, from which they had been barred in the aftermath of his overthrow; and a movement toward provincial elections later this year.

“They’re trying to build a modern democracy in the rubble of three years of tyranny,” in a region that has been “hostile to freedom,” Bush said.

On the economic front, the president said that oil production had increased in fields north of Baghdad despite neglect of oil infrastructure during the Hussein years.

He said Iraq was outspending the United States on Iraqi reconstruction by a ratio of 11 to 1, and he expected it to soon cover 100% of its reconstruction expenses, and that electricity production was above pre-war levels, but insufficient to meet growing demands.

Steven A. Cook, an expert on the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in a telephone interview that while the indications of progress cited by Bush were accurate, many were falling short or were weakened by loopholes. “It’s a rather limited political progress,” he said.

Perhaps more important, Cook said, the situation appeared to be unraveling.

“It’s tough to talk about progress one day after 100 people were killed in the worst violence in months,” he said.

james.gerstenzang@latimes.com