By Xinhua
Washington : U.S. President George W. Bush defended on Wednesday the Iraq war as a “right decision” despite a high cost as thousands of Americans staged anti-war demonstrations across the nation to mark the war’s fifth anniversary.
“Removing Saddam Hussein from power was the right decision, and this is a fight America can and must win,” Bush said during a speech at the Pentagon.
With six sentences began with “because we acted,” Bush bragged about how the war “benefited” Iraqi people by ending Saddam’s regime.
He also cited declining “Iraqi civilian death, sectarian killings and attacks on the U.S. troops,” capture or killing of thousands of extremists and expansion of Iraqi security forces as the military progress achieved by the Operation Freedom in Iraq.
“To ensure that military progress in Iraq is quickly followed up with real improvements in daily life, we have doubled the number of provincial reconstruction teams in Iraq,” he added.
However, Bush admitted that the Iraq war launched on March 20, 2003 became “longer, harder and more costly than we anticipated.”
“There’s still hard work to be done in Iraq,” he said. “The gains we’ve made are fragile and reversible.”
He reiterated his opposition to fast withdrawal of the current 155,000 U.S. troops from Iraq.
“We have learned through hard experience what happens when we pull our forces back too fast. The terrorists and extremists step in, they fill vacuums, establish safe havens and use them to spread chaos and carnage.”
He said that he would wait for recommendation from top U.S. commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, who will come to Washington to testify before Congress next month, before making any decision on the troop levels in Iraq.
The speech did mention the ballooning war budgets nibbling the U.S. economy, the U.S. private security guards’ violence resulting in Iraqi civilian death, the controversial interrogation tactics raising human rights abuse charges and the conclusion in a newly-released defense intelligence report indicating no relationship between Saddam’s regime and al Qaida.
A poll released by CNN on Wednesday presented a different picture of the Iraq war in U.S. public eyes.
According to the poll, about 66 percent of the 1,019 adults surveyed opposed the Iraq war and 61 percent Americans said that troop withdrawal should begin in months after the inauguration of the new president next year.
It also showed that 71 percent of Americans blamed the war spending in Iraq for the country’s economic woes.
Some U.S. known economists said last week that the Iraq war would wind up costing U.S. taxpayers about 3 trillion U.S. dollars.
A number of demonstrations were staged and scheduled across the country on Wednesday, calling for the end of the war that has cost nearly 4,000 U.S. troops’ lives and over 400 billion dollars through December 2007.
Anti-war protestors block the entrance to the Internal Revenue Service and sought to focus attention on taxpayers’ money that fund the war. They also disrupted the offices of lobbyists who represent military contractors and oil companies profiting from the war.
From New Jersey to North Dakota, college students planned walkouts and shut down military recruiting offices on campus.
Hundreds of protest events were also planned nationwide, including vigils and larger rallies in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami.