President George W. Bush's pledge to bring some troops back from Iraq may buy time, but his strategy is little changed and he left the task of ending the war to the next president, US newspaper editorials said on Friday.
Bush told Americans in a televised address Thursday evening that US forces could be cut by about 20,000 by July and he linked the reduction to what he said was progress on the ground, especially in volatile Anbar province and in Baghdad.
The administration's so-called "surge" over the past eight months involved deployment of about 21,500 combat troops. The Washington Post said Bush's strategy of a gradual withdrawal was "the least bad plan" since a more hasty troop drawdown would result in massive civilian casualties.
But the paper's editorial said Bush's speech was marred by important omissions. "The president failed to acknowledge that, according to the standards he himself established in January, the surge of US troops into Iraq has been a failure," it said, pointing to the lack of political accord in Iraq.
The New York Times' editorial headlined "No Exit, No Strategy" also blasted Bush for refusing to recognise failure. "No amount of smoke could obscure the truth: Mr Bush has no strategy to end his disastrous war and no strategy for containing the chaos he unleashed," it said. "It seems the burden of ending the war will fall to the next president."
The Wall Street Journal said Republicans benefited this week after top US General David Petraeus and Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker reported progress in the war. "The most obvious winners are congressional Republicans. The pressure they had faced to join with Democrats on withdrawal deadlines has now ebbed," it said, adding that Bush had bought himself another six to nine months in Iraq.
But the Louisville Courier-Journal was among several newspapers that said the progress reported by Petraeus and Crocker was tenuous. "Those are assessments to which the Bush administration and its nervous Republican congressional allies will cling desperately, like shipwrecked sailors grabbing at flotsam in a heaving sea," it wrote.
"Americans need to be presented with fresh alternatives, such as carefully measured troop withdrawals, intensified regional diplomacy and de facto partition to separate Iraq's warring sectarian factions," it said. The New York Post said Bush made no dramatic policy changes, "effectively consigning the future of Iraq, if not the entire Middle East, to the American presidential political process."