Bush Keeps Up Drumbeat on Iraq’s Progress

Seeking to shore up Americans’ sinking support for the war, President Bush on Wednesday presented a picture of Iraq climbing back from economic ruin with U.S. help, and he argued that such progress was one of the keys to building democracy and political stability there.

In the second of four speeches before Iraq’s elections, scheduled for a week from today, to choose a permanent government, Bush said the United States was helping Iraq to build a free-market economy and rebuild its roads, electrical systems, schools and other public buildings.

The infrastructure was largely built shortly before and during Saddam Hussein’s regime, and it was damaged when anti-Hussein U.N. sanctions blocked maintenance and repair. Much of what didn’t collapse from age during the regime’s three decades was destroyed during the U.S. invasion nearly 33 months ago and the guerrilla war that followed.

“We’re helping the Iraqis rebuild their infrastructure and reform their economy and build the prosperity that will give all Iraqis a stake in a free and peaceful Iraq,” Bush said.

Bush’s address to the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan organization that seeks to promote understanding of foreign policy and the United States’ role in the world, was intended to convince Americans that the war in Iraq was making more progress than news accounts suggested and that it would ultimately succeed. At the same time, he acknowledged that serious economic and security shortfalls remained, saying: “Reconstruction has not gone as well as we had hoped.”

Bush presented the efforts to rebuild Iraq politically and economically as the next important steps, along with the campaign to provide security. U.S. deaths in Iraq have passed 2,100. Attacks are expected to increase before the elections.

“We have learned that winning the battle for Iraqi cities is only the first step,” he said. “We also have to win the ‘battle after the battle’ -- by helping Iraqis consolidate their gains and keep the terrorists from returning.”

The speech drew criticism almost as soon as the president finished speaking to the foreign relations group at a Washington hotel.

Disputing Bush’s claims of progress, Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) cited recent government reports and his sources in the military -- including front-line troops and generals, he said -- to question the president’s portrait of progress in Iraq.

At a news conference, Murtha said that of the $2.1 billion allocated for the production of potable water, $581 million had been spent. Only occasionally, he said, have electric utilities reached prewar service levels. There are serious shortages of demolition experts, Special Forces personnel, intelligence officers and translators, Murtha said.

“We lost the hearts and minds of the [Iraqi] people,” said Murtha, who had supported the war but recently called for a withdrawal of U.S. troops.

Challenging Bush’s optimism, he added: “I don’t see the kind of progress that he sees.”

“The president does himself no good when he describes ‘amazing progress’ in Iraq without even acknowledging that two-thirds of Iraqis lack electricity,” said Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), the House Democratic whip. “Oil production is below prewar levels, and unemployment is estimated to be as high as 40%.”

Bush spoke on the 64th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which he used as a metaphor for the danger of leaving the United States unprotected, in this case in the campaign against terrorism, by failing to foster democracy in Iraq.

Unlike the supportive partisans and military crowds he has often addressed in recent months, the audience only briefly interrupted Bush with applause. It offered a lukewarm response after the 34-minute address.

By contrast, when he argued his course for overall victory in Iraq last week in his first speech of the series, the midshipmen of the U.S. Naval Academy provided a more demonstratively friendly audience.

Echoing his pre-invasion optimism, Bush said Wednesday that Iraq had a young and educated workforce, abundant land and water resources, and huge oil reserves.

“The entrepreneurial spirit is strong in Iraq,” he said. But he acknowledged the on-the-ground reality, saying that “corruption is a problem at both the national and local levels of the Iraqi government.”

Bush said the United States had focused on small, local projects that would produce “noticeable improvements and offer an alternative to the destructive vision of the terrorists.” Specifically, he said that in 2 1/2 years, the United States had helped Iraq make about 3,000 school renovations, “train more than 30,000 teachers, distribute more than 8 million textbooks, rebuild irrigation infrastructure to help more than 400,000 rural Iraqis and improve drinking water for more than 3 million people.”

The population of Iraq is estimated to be 28 million.

Bush cited two examples to argue that the United States was making progress in rebuilding Iraq: the cities of Najaf and Mosul.

In Najaf, about 90 miles south of Baghdad, Bush said, the United States had worked with local officials to rebuild the police force, repair homes, refurbish schools, restore water and other services, and reopen a soccer stadium. Businesses had opened, and pilgrims were returning to visit the shrine.

“Najaf is now in the hands of elected government officials,” Bush said, adding that “political life has returned” and Iraqi police were responsible for day-to-day security.

Still, he said, sustaining electricity is “a major challenge” and clean water is in short supply. But, he said, power substations are under construction, and water treatment and sewage units are being installed.

In Mosul, a major city of Sunnis, Kurds and other ethnic groups in northern Iraq, police stations and firehouses have been rebuilt, Bush said. But he acknowledged that the city needed more electricity and that terrorism remained a concern. Partisans hanging election posters were killed there a few days ago, he said.

Private analysts said each city had made progress. But they cautioned against reading too much into the improvements.

Patrick Clawson, a longtime Iraq analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a nonpartisan think tank, said it was “a fair statement” that Najaf had improved. Although Mosul had improved, he said, it had suffered reversals before.

Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, also a nonpartisan think tank, said that Najaf was “a fairly homogeneous Shia city” that wasn’t representative of the real challenges in Iraq. And, he said, in Mosul the U.S. had frequently “patched one leak only to find another.”

Last month, Mosul was judged too dangerous for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to fly over in a helicopter -- much less to drive on its streets -- during her brief visit to a U.S. military base near the city.

Her airplane landed at the local airport and she transferred under heavy security to a waiting helicopter, which flew over largely unpopulated areas to avoid flying over the city.

Assessing the overall Iraqi economy, the Brookings Institution, a generally liberal think tank in Washington, reports that Iraq produced 3,742 megawatts of electricity in November, down from 4,159 megawatts in September but near the 3,958 megawatts produced before the war.

And it said that unemployment, estimated at 50% to 60% in June 2003, was now 27% to 40%. The U.S. invasion was in March 2003.

On Capitol Hill, House Democrats sought a common strategy Wednesday, but all they could agree on was that Bush’s approach was doomed, Democratic lawmakers said.

Democrats advocated a range of options, including support for Murtha’s call to quickly begin withdrawing troops and redeploying some nearby. There are approximately 160,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

Nearly all of the options were “variations on the theme of an exit strategy,” said Rep. Sam Farr (D-Carmel).

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Times staff writers Paul Richter and Tyler Marshall contributed to this report.