Bush says Iraq drawdown is on track

MANAMA, Bahrain – President Bush said Saturday the United States was on track to bring home at least 20,000 troops from Iraq by this summer, but he stressed that he was willing to halt the drawdown “in order to make sure we succeed.”

After meeting in Kuwait with his top Iraq commander, Gen. David Petraeus, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, the president presented a mixed picture of the conditions one year after he sent additional troops there.

Bush said extremist militias had been disrupted but that they remain a concern.

“We cannot take the achievements of 2007 for granted,” he said, referring to the reduction in violence toward the end of 2007, after the deadlier months at the start of the year.

But he also seemed to claim some vindication for his decision to send an additional 30,000 soldiers to Iraq last year to help quell spiraling violence. Bush pursued his policy in the face of questions not only from Democrats but also from many Republicans and generals at the Pentagon.

“A lot of people thought that I was going to recommend pulling out or pulling back,” Bush said. “Quite the contrary; I recommended increasing the number of forces so they could get more in the fight, because I believed all along if people are given a chance to live in a free society, they’ll do the hard work necessary to live in a free society.

“Iraq is now a different place from one year ago,” Bush said after his first face-to-face meeting in four months with Petraeus and Crocker.

With a stop at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, the president was as close to Iraq as he is likely to get on his eight-day trip through the Middle East and Persian Gulf, unless he makes a detour to the war zone. The supply base is roughly 100 miles from Iraq.

Speaking to about 3,000 U.S. troops who had gathered in the open on a chilly morning, Bush delivered a seven-minute pep talk, saying, “There is no doubt in my mind that we will succeed.”

He told the cheering troops that when the history of the early 21st century is written, “the final page will say: Victory was achieved by the United States of America for the good of the world.”

Administration officials have spoken for several weeks about their goal of reducing the deployment by five brigades by July, from a high of 20. That would bring the number of U.S. troops in Iraq below 140,000, from the 158,000 who were in the country at the end of December. There were about 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq a year ago when Bush announced he was sending more.

But Bush told reporters in the supply center’s operations room that he had told Petraeus, “If you want to slow her down, fine; it’s up to you.”

The meeting with the top U.S. military officer and diplomat assigned to Iraq provided the president an in-person update ahead of their March report to Congress on conditions in Iraq. Bush speaks frequently with them over secure video lines.

The general later told reporters that he was seeing “mixed signs” about conditions in Iraq.

He discussed a current operation against al-Qaida in Iraq, a home-grown insurgent group that the administration says is led by foreigners, cautioning that to characterize the offensive as a final push “would be premature.”

The general also raised concerns about what the administration says is Iran’s support of anti-U.S. forces. He said that senior Iranian leaders had told Iraq’s top officials that it would stop “the funding, arming, training and directing of militia extremists,” but the United States was waiting to see that promise kept.

And Petraeus said that although certain methods of attacking U.S. troops had been curtailed, strikes using “explosively formed penetrators” had gone up in the past 10 days “by a factor of two or three.”

The United States has accused Iran of providing the weapons, among the deadliest that U.S. troops face, to the Mahdi Army, a Shiite Muslim militia.

Drawing attention to what the administration says is Iran’s role in Iraq is a central element of the president’s travels among largely Sunni Muslim nations wary of Shiite-led Iran.

Bush later flew to Bahrain, the first visit here by a U.S. president. He is scheduled to visit United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt before returning to Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.