President Obama's Oval Address Tonight at 8pm EDT - WATCH LIVE ON BCNN3.TV
Saying there is "still a lot of work to do" politically in Iraq, President Obama on Tuesday congratulated U.S. troops stationed at Fort Bliss for their accomplishments in the war zone over the past seven years. He thanked a gathering of uniformed service members, some of them about to deploy overseas, saying their service made the withdrawal of combat troops possible.
"We are in transition," Obama said. "And that could not have been accomplished had it not been for the men and women here at Fort Bliss and across the country.
Still, Obama said he would not be taking a "victory lap" when he addresses the nation from the Oval Office on Tuesday night.
"It's not going to be self-congratulatory," Obama said of his prime-time speech, only the second such address he has made as president. "There's still a lot of work that we've got to do to make sure that Iraq is an effective partner with us."
Obama traveled to the Texas base, home of the 1st Armored Division, on a day unusual for its focus on the two wars he inherited upon taking office - a day his advisers hoped would underscore his fulfilled promise to end the Iraq conflict. Obama rose to national prominence as an opponent of the Iraq invasion and 2007 surge, saying months after it began - as the Democratic primary campaign was heating up - that the troop increase in Iraq "had not worked."
Obama called former President George W. Bush on Tuesday and is expected to mention him by name in the speech. But he has mostly sidestepped the question of whether he has changed his view of the surge, with his advisers saying that it was a combination of added troop strength, political improvements and the Sunni awakening that helped stabilize the country.
Further tests are on the horizon in Iraq, where a government has yet to be formed more than five months after the elections. Under the Status of Forces agreement signed by Bush and the Iraqis, all remaining U.S. troops are scheduled to leave by the end of 2011. The Obama administration has left itself very little room to alter those plans, saying that it would require a request from the Iraqis themselves to leave troops behind and that no request has come in. Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said he could not speculate about an extended U.S. troop presence because it is a "hypothetical."
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SOURCE: The Washington Post
WATCH: Obama Tells Troops, 'Our Task in Iraq Is Not Yet Over'
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates spoke on Tuesday at the American Legion convention in Milwaukee.
The United States may be bringing troops home from the war in Iraq, but there is a "tough slog" ahead in the war in Afghanistan, President Obama told troops in Fort Bliss, Texas on Tuesday.
Speaking just hours before he is to deliver an Oval Office address commemorating what is supposed to be the end of combat in Iraq, where some 50,000 troops will remain until next year in a mainly advisory and training role, Mr. Obama warned that the American mission was not yet accomplished. Mr. Obama told the troops that his address was "not going to be a victory lap; it's not going to be self-congratulatory. There's still a lot of work."
Mr. Obama's address tonight is meant to convey that he has kept one of the central promises of his campaign: withdrawing American combat troops from Iraq. But he is tiptoeing a fine line between taking credit for the withdrawal and echoing the "mission accomplished" tone that President Bush struck so famously seven years ago, and that came back to haunt Mr. Bush in the years that Iraq fell into further chaos.
Mr. Obama called Mr. Bush on Tuesday morning from Air Force One as he was en route to Fort Bliss, White House officials said. The two spoke "just for a few moments," Benjamin Rhodes, a national security spokesman, told reporters aboard the plane, declining to give any details.
In rolling out the promises-kept theme on the Iraq withdrawal, Mr. Obama is trying to reconcile his record of opposition to the war, and to the troop surge ordered by President Bush which many military officials credit for stemming violence in Iraq, with his role as a war-time commander seeking to credit his troops with a mission accomplished.
While there were "big debates about war and peace" across the country, the president said, "the one thing we don't argue about is that we have the finest fighting force in the history of the world." He got shouts of approval from the assembled Fort Bliss troops for that line. (The event was covered by a small pool of print and television reporters.)
"The main message I have tonight and the main message I have to you is congratulations on a job well done," Mr. Obama said. "The most pride I take in my job is being your commander in chief."
On Afghanistan, Mr. Obama said that he was convinced that under the command of Gen. David H. Petraeus, the latest American military commander in Afghanistan, "we have the troops who are there in a position to start taking the fight to the terrorists." But he warned that there would be heavy casualties.
In Baghdad, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. met with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and other senior Iraqi politicians. At each meeting, Mr. Biden previewed the main themes in President Obama's speech and made the point that the United States wanted a long-term relationship with Iraq.
But another topic of the closed-door discussions was the Iraqis' faltering efforts to form a government, months after elections.
After the meetings a senior administration officials declined to say if any headway had been made.
"We do come away from this day believing negotiations are extremely active and that's positive," he said. "But we still need to see the Iraqis move forward and actually come to agreement and form a government."
As the start of the morning meeting with Mr. Maliki, Mr. Biden suggested that reports of increased violence in Iraq had been exaggerated.
"Notwithstanding what the national press says about increased violence, the truth is things are still very much different," Mr. Biden said. "Things are much safer."
Still, Mr. Biden traveling party got a vivid warning of the remaining threats when three alerts sounded that the Green Zone was under possible mortar or rocket attack and they were instructed to take cover.
In Washington, a senior intelligence official told reporters that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is estimated to have just 10 percent of the strength it had during the peak of its manpower in 2006 and 2007. The official declined to provide the actual figures that the estimate was drawn from, and he said he expected the group would have a core of fighters inside Iraq for "a long time to come."
The senior official, who declined to be identified because he was discussing classified intelligence assessments, noted the sharp reduction of violence in the country and said that attacks in Iraq had been lowered to a "tolerable" level.
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SOURCE: The New York Times
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