Making a Case for a Mission

Making a Case for a Mission
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/14/politics/14ASSE.html?hp
By DAVID E. SANGER Published: April 14, 2004
President Bush at Tuesday night's press conference.

WASHINGTON, April 13 — Facing a moment of political peril unlike any in the more than one thousand days of his presidency, George W. Bush made the case on Tuesday night for staying the course in Iraq with the language and zeal of a missionary and combined it with a stark warning that failure would embolden America's enemies around the world.

---snip---

It is Mr. Bush's sense of mission that sustains him these days, his friends say. But that trait may also explain why he was so unwilling to directly engage the reporters who kept asking him whether he had regrets about failing to do more to prepare for terrorist attacks in that fateful summer of 2001 or whether he believed that he had made mistakes in the march to Baghdad.

It is not difficult to find aides to Mr. Bush who question whether the intelligence about unconventional weapons was flawed. And it is easy to find members of the administration who question whether L. Paul Bremer III, the administrator in Iraq, should have disbanded the army, or taken on Moktada al-Sadr, the fiery, anti-American Shiite cleric, without a clear plan to arrest or kill him.

---snip---

Beyond the rallying call, however, Mr. Bush offered little in the way of new strategy, perhaps because he believes none is called for, perhaps because to offer it would be to acknowledge that the course he followed in Iraq over the past year did not end up with the April 2004 he once envisioned. It was supposed to be a month in which the country was on the path to self-governance. Instead, it has proven the most deadly two weeks for American forces since the war began, with more dead — 86 soldiers — and more wounded than in the first days of the invasion itself.