IRAQ - New Bush Context For The Iraq War.

In his June 28 speech, President Bush set out to reshape perceptions of what was happening in Iraq after months in which a persistent Sunni insurgency has undermined US public support for the war. His speech provoked signs of a split in his own Republican party and prompted inconsistent statements from administration officials about how soon things might improve.

If the context was new and more politically challenging to Bush than ever, though, the theme of his nationally televised address from Fort Bragg, North Carolina, was not. Talking to the Americans from the army base, in front of 750 members of the 82nd Airborne Division and the Special Operations unit based there, Bush spoke in somber tones of the need for staying power in what has become a long conflict.

Bush said the daily sacrifice of American lives in Iraq was "worth it and it is vital to the future security of our country". As he had in the past, the president melded the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks with the Salafi insurgent enemies now faced in Iraq.

Bush has chosen other sites outside Washington for some major speeches, including one in the Cincinnati train station in October 2002 to lay out his case that Saddam's arsenal posed a direct threat to his neighbours and the US, and his speech aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, to declare that the Iraqi leader had been ousted and that "major combat operations" were over. At that event on a carrier off San Diego, he was almost ebullient, declaring: "We have seen the turning of the tide". But the speech on June 28 was a call for stoicism and endurance, during what Bush termed, for the second time in a week, "a time of testing" for America.

The president was more forthright in acknowledging the problems the US faced, and more direct than usual in raising and rebutting criticism of two elements of his policy: his opposition to setting a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq and his decision not to send more US troops to quell the insurgency.

The questions now are how many more times over how many years he might have to deliver the same message of patience and resolve - and whether the US public, confronted with a mounting death toll, an open-ended military commitment, lack of allied support and a growing price tag, will accept it. The speech offered no new policies or course corrections, and for the most part was a re-statement of the ideas and language which Bush has been employing for two and a half years to explain the war and assert that it was an integral part of a broader struggle to protect the US from terrorism.

Using language which infuriated those opponents who said there was no link between the war and Al-Qaeda, he cast the battle in Iraq as part of the bigger conflict begun with 9/11, which he mentioned explicitly five times and he alluded to at others, and he invoked the specter of Osama Bin Laden.

It was, in essence, a repeat of a speech he delivered 13 months earlier, when he assured the Americans during an appearance at the Army War College that, while the job of achieving stability in Iraq would be hard, he had a plan and the US had the will to see it through. Nevertheless, critics remained unconvinced.

Bob Kerrey, a Democratic former senator from Nebraska who supported the war, was on June 30 quoted by The NYT as saying of the Bush team: "They've got a credibility problem. It's hard to make the case. They've got to rely on tactics: repeating things and staying on message".

Bush was more blunt than he usually was in describing his own reactions, acknowledging the morale-sapping nature of the bloodshed and calling the pictures "horrifying". Looking ahead, he warned of "tough moments that test America's resolve". But he said the sacrifice would prove worthwhile to the Iraqis and to Americans.

Bush and his aides have always said they will not make policy based on polls, especially on issues of national security, and one of Bush's characteristic qualities is his steadfastness - his critics might say stubbornness or rigidity - in the face of changing circumstances.

A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll on June 28 found that 53% of respondents said the war had been a mistake and 61% felt Bush did not have a clear plan for handling the situation there. But while Bush's approval rating in the poll for his handling of Iraq was at just 40%, his approval rating on handling terrorism stood at 55%.

At each moment of doubt about what the US has got itself into in Iraq, Bush has suggested that real progress was being obscured by last-ditch efforts of the enemy and that the situation would improve as the Iraqis took the next steps towards stability.

He has cause for some optimism. While the bloodshed goes on unabated, the Iraqis have made real progress in establishing a political system which includes Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs and Kurds. US and Iraqi forces have been capturing or killing leaders of the insurgency and scooping up huge caches of weapons, ammunitions and explosives. Yet the insurgency is bigger, more determined and better organised than it initially appeared. And Bush's credibility has come under fire.

To Bush the issue is not of policy adjustment or frankness, but of a fundamental challenge to values and security from which the US cannot shrink, a formulation the White House has used to hold off criticism of the specifics of its approach. Bush said: "We know that when the work is hard, the proper response is not retreat, it is courage. And we know that this great ideal of human freedom is entrusted to us in a special way, and that the ideal of liberty is worth defending".