September 15, 2007	Saturday	Ramazan 2, 1428

WASHINGTON: US President George W. Bush will leave the White House in 2009 with the conflict in Iraq unresolved, bequeathing the consequences of the war and its heavy burden to his successor, analysts say.

In his speech late on Thursday, Bush made it clear that although he ordered the troops into Iraq in March 2003 to topple late dictator Saddam Hussein, he does not expect to be the one to oversee a complete withdrawal.

Iraqi leaders “understand that their success will require US political, economic and security engagement that extends beyond my presidency”, Bush told a war-weary American public in a nationwide address.

“These Iraqi leaders have asked for an enduring relationship with America.” Analysts agreed that Bush’s main concern now was to ensure that conditions in Iraq, if not in the best possible situation, were certainly the least worst to leave behind for his successor.

With elections looming in November 2008 and Bush due to leave the White House in January 2009, it seems certain he will be passing the poisoned chalice of Iraq onto his successor, whether Republican or Democrat.

“He obviously wants to get our position in Iraq to a point where it’s in a good place for the next president to come in,” a senior administration official said.

“And this is something that whomever is elected in 2008 as the next president is going to gauge: what our presence in Iraq, and how it affects our national security, means.” Bush argued that progress on the ground in the past months in providing greater security meant that some of the troops could soon begin coming home, announcing a partial pullout of some 20,000 out of the 169,000 troops in Iraq by mid-2008.

But experts counter that he really had no other choice, except to take the huge political risk of prolonging the deployment of troops already in Iraq since the US armed forces were working at full capacity.

“I would be very, very surprised if troop levels were to drop below six figures while Bush is still in office. He has made a decision to pass on to the next president the essential decision of when and how to get out,” said Charles Kupchan from the Council on Foreign Relations.

“In some ways his calculation at this point is that it’s better to pass this problem on to the next president than to assume responsibility for withdrawal because to some extent to do so would be to accept failure.” It seems that when history begins to judge his legacy, Bush could well rank not alongside Franklin D. Roosevelt, revered in the United States as the conqueror of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Rather Bush could find himself sharing shelf space with Lyndon Johnson, whose name is forever linked with the Vietnam draft.

“This is a president who has a deep conviction that he has done the right thing, and he is going to stay the course despite having very clear political incentives not to do so,” Kupchan said.

“To some extent he seems to have made some peace with the fact that he may well go down in history as one of the most unpopular presidents in modern time.” “He’s going to bequeath this to his successor,” agreed Lawrence Korb, assistant defence secretary during the Republican administration of Ronald Reagan.

“And if things don’t turn out well, him and his acolytes will try and shift the blame to president (Hillary) Clinton, (Barack) Obama, (Rudolph) Giuliani or whoever takes over.

“There’s no way he can (finish the job) because of the mistakes that he’s made until now, in terms of achieving his objectives of a peaceful, stable, democratic Iraq.” But another expert cautioned that in fact Bush was fighting very hard to pursue the policy he believed in.

“The next president is going to inherit this situation. Pulling the plug now would mean to inherit a dangerous situation,” said Peter Rodman, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and assistant defence secretary from 2001-2007.

“The presidential candidates have an interest in seeing Bush’s strategy of stabilisation succeed in order to inherit the largest range of options.”—AFP