In a sobering assessment of the Iraq war, US President George W. Bush acknowledged on Monday that Americans' resolve had been shaken by grisly scenes of death and des-truction and he pointedly criticized the performance of US-trained Iraqi troops.
"No question about it," he said. "The bombers are having an effect."
Bush also offered a warm testimonial for US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in the face of a growing number of expressions of no-confidence by Republican senators.
Rumsfeld appears "rough and gruff," Bush said, but "he's a good, decent man. He's a caring fellow."
For 53 minutes, Bush fielded questions on international and domestic affairs. It was his 17th formal news conference, held one day before he flies to the presidential retreat at Camp David for a vacation that will stretch into early next year and include a stay at his Texas ranch.
Bush spoke a day after the deadliest attacks in Iraq since July -- killing at least 54 people in Najaf and at least 13 in Karbala -- and six weeks before Iraqis vote for a transitional assembly that will choose a president and a government and draft a permanent constitution. US newspapers showed chilling pictures of rebels in the heart of Baghdad executing election workers in cold blood.
"And so the American people are taking a look at Iraq and wondering whether the Iraqis are eventually going to be able to fight off these bombers and killers," Bush said in perhaps his clearest expression of frustration with Iraqi forces.
Bush's strategy calls for US troops to protect Iraq while local police and soldiers are trained to do the job themselves, eventually allowing the US to withdraw.
"Now I would call the results mixed in terms of standing up Iraqi units who are willing to fight," Bush said in a candid assessment. "There have been some cases where, when the heat got on, they left the battlefield. That's unacceptable. Iraq will never secure itself if they have troops that, when the heat gets on, they leave the battlefield."
What is needed, he said, is a better military command structure.
Polls show an erosion in Americans' confidence that a stable, democratic government will be established in Iraq.
"Polls change. Polls go up, polls go down," Bush said.
He said he understood why Americans have doubts about Iraq's ability to deal with the situation.
"They're looking on your TV screen and seeing indiscriminate bombings, where thousands of innocent -- or hundreds of innocent Iraqis are getting killed," he said.
But Bush said those pictures do not reflect the fact that 15 of Iraq's 18 provinces are relatively stable and that small businesses are starting up.
"Life is better now than it was under [former Iraqi president] Saddam Hussein," he said. "But no question about it. The bombers are having an effect ... They're trying to shake the will of the Iraqi people and, frankly, trying to shake the will of the American people."
Bush warned that insurgents would try to delay Iraq's elections, scheduled for Jan. 30, and intimidate the people.
"I certainly don't expect the process to be trouble-free," Bush said.
"Yet I am confident of the result. I'm confident that terrorists will fail, the elections will go forward and Iraq will be a democracy," he said.
Bush said he could not predict when US forces could come home.
He also renewed his warning to Syria and Iran against "meddling" in Iraq's political process.
"I meant it. And hopefully those governments heard what I said," he said, without specifying consequences.
Meanwhile, more Americans than ever, some 56 percent, say the war in Iraq is not worth fighting, according to a poll on Monday.
Some 57 percent of those surveyed disapproved of Bush's handling of the situation, just one point lower than his rating at the height of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, the ABC News/Washington Post poll found.
Rumsfeld's approval rating was only 35 percent -- half of where it stood when Baghdad fell -- and 52 percent said Bush should sack him.
Americans also doubted Iraq's elections planned for Jan. 30 could proceed adequately, with 58 percent saying the country was not ready and 54 percent saying the polls would not be honest and fair. But 60 percent said the elections should be held as planned anyway.
Also see story:
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has