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President says he sees progress, but explaining where is difficult
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| Contributor | RP |
| Last Edited | RP Mar 21, 2006 04:28pm |
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| Category | Speech |
| Media | Newspaper - San Francisco Chronicle |
| News Date | Tuesday, March 21, 2006 10:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | As President Bush tells the tale, the battle for Tal Afar is a case study in how U.S. and Iraqi forces working together can root out insurgents and restore stability. "The example of Tal Afar," he told an audience here Monday, "gives me confidence in our strategy."
Reports from the streets of Tal Afar, half a world away, tell a more complex story. U.S. forces last fall did drive out radicals who had brutalized the midsize city near the Syrian border. But lately, residents say, the city has taken another dark turn. "The armed men are fewer," Nassir Sebti, 42, an air-conditioning mechanic, told a Washington Post interviewer Monday, "but the assassinations between Sunni and Shiites have increased."
The twists of Tal Afar underline the difficulties Bush has had in reassuring a doubtful U.S. public that progress is being made in Iraq. The president and his aides say the positive developments in Iraq get overwhelmed by the grim pictures of mayhem and massacre that dominate the evening news. If Americans knew about the success stories, the White House maintains, they would understand Bush's confidence of victory.
Yet even the success stories seem to come with asterisks. The administration hailed the election of a new democratic parliament last year, but the new body for more than three months has proved incapable of forming a government.
The cycle has taken a new spin with the latest evolution of Iraq from violent insurgency against foreign occupiers to sectarian strife bordering on civil war. Since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra last month, hundreds of Iraqis have been killed in reprisals in a bloody spate of violence that has eclipsed most periods during the three years since the U.S.-led invasion.
All of this has taken its toll on Bush's credibility, Republican strategists say, making it hard for him to make people see what he sees in Iraq. |
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