US President George W. Bush said on Tuesday that the decision about when to withdraw all US troops from Iraq will fall to future presidents and Iraqi leaders, suggesting that US involvement will continue at least through 2008.
Acknowledging the public's growing unease with the war -- and election-year skittishness among fellow Republicans -- the president nonetheless vowed to keep US soldiers in the fight.
"If I didn't believe we could succeed, I wouldn't be there. I wouldn't put those kids there," Bush declared.
He also stood by embattled Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
"I don't believe he should resign. He's done a fine job. Every war plan looks good on paper until you meet the enemy," he said.
In his second major news conference of the year, Bush confronted his political problems by addressing them directly.
"Nobody likes war. It creates a sense of uncertainty in the country," he said. "War creates trauma."
He acknowledged that Republicans are worried about their political standing in November.
"There's a certain unease as you head into an election year," Bush told a wide-ranging news conference that lasted nearly an hour.
At an Air Force base in Illinois, Vice President Dick Cheney accused some Bush administration critics on Tuesday of being too quick to argue that the Iraq war cannot be won and of underestimating a continuing threat of terrorist attacks.
Part of a broad effort to counter polls that show waning public support for the war and for Bush personally, Cheney emphasized what the administration has said is underreported evidence of improvement in Iraq. He also took on those who have been questioning Bush's approach in the three-year-old war.
"A few seem almost eager to conclude that the whole struggle is already lost," Cheney told an enthusiastic military audience. "But they're wrong."
More than 2,300 Americans have died in three years of war in Iraq. Polls show the public's support for the war and for Bush himself have dramatically declined in recent months. The public's support for the war and the president himself has declined dramatically in recent months, jeopardizing his second-term agenda.
The Bush news conference marked a new push by Bush to confront doubts about his strategy in Iraq. A day earlier, he acknowledged to a sometimes skeptical audience that there was dwindling support for his Iraq policy and that he understood why people were disheartened.
"The terrorists haven't given up. They're tough-minded. They like to kill," he said on Tuesday. "There will be more tough fighting ahead."
Bush said he did not agree with former Iraqi prime minister Ayad Allawi, who told the BBC on Sunday: "If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is."
Bush said others inside and outside Iraq think the nation has stopped short of civil war.
"There are other voices coming out of Iraq, by the way, other than Mr Allawi, who I know by the way -- like. A good fellow," Bush said. "But the way I look at the situation is, the Iraqis looked and decided not to go into civil war."
CHAMPIONS: President Lai congratulated the players’ outstanding performance, cheering them for marking a new milestone in the nation’s baseball history Taiwan on Sunday won their first Little League Baseball World Series (LLBWS) title in 29 years, as Taipei’s Dong Yuan Elementary School defeated a team from Las Vegas 7-0 in the championship game in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania. It was Taiwan’s first championship in the annual tournament since 1996, ending a nearly three-decade drought. “It has been a very long time ... and we finally made it,” Taiwan manager Lai Min-nan (賴敏男) said after the game. Lai said he last managed a Dong Yuan team in at the South Williamsport in 2015, when they were eliminated after four games. “There is
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers have declared they survived recall votes to remove them from office today, although official results are still pending as the vote counting continues. Although final tallies from the Central Election Commission (CEC) are still pending, preliminary results indicate that the recall campaigns against all seven KMT lawmakers have fallen short. As of 6:10 pm, Taichung Legislators Yen Kuan-heng (顏寬恒) and Yang Chiung-ying (楊瓊瓔), Hsinchu County Legislator Lin Szu-ming (林思銘), Nantou County Legislator Ma Wen-chun (馬文君) and New Taipei City Legislator Lo Ming-tsai (羅明才) had all announced they
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) yesterday visited Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), as the chipmaker prepares for volume production of Nvidia’s next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) chips. It was Huang’s third trip to Taiwan this year, indicating that Nvidia’s supply chain is deeply connected to Taiwan. Its partners also include packager Siliconware Precision Industries Co (矽品精密) and server makers Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) and Quanta Computer Inc (廣達). “My main purpose is to visit TSMC,” Huang said yesterday. “As you know, we have next-generation architecture called Rubin. Rubin is very advanced. We have now taped out six brand new
POWER PLANT POLL: The TPP said the number of ‘yes’ votes showed that the energy policy should be corrected, and the KMT said the result was a win for the people’s voice The government does not rule out advanced nuclear energy generation if it meets the government’s three prerequisites, President William Lai (賴清德) said last night after the number of votes in favor of restarting a nuclear power plant outnumbered the “no” votes in a referendum yesterday. The referendum failed to pass, despite getting more “yes” votes, as the Referendum Act (公民投票法) states that the vote would only pass if the votes in favor account for more than one-fourth of the total number of eligible voters and outnumber the opposing votes. Yesterday’s referendum question was: “Do you agree that the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant
RSS