The President had a dry run yesterday in preparation for his prime time stage managed address to the nation on Iraq, to try and buoy up the crumbling support for his war.
WASHINGTON - As public support for his Iraq policy declines, President Bush is working to convince wary Americans that he has a military and political strategy for success in the war in which 1,730 U.S. troops have been killed.
In his radio address on Saturday, Bush warned that there is likely to be more tough fighting to come in Iraq. And, as he did in his meeting at the White House Friday with Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, Bush urged Americans to share their confidence in a positive outcome to the war.
"The Iraqi people are growing in optimism and hope," Bush said. "They understand that the violence is only a part of the reality in Iraq."
Of course, the President is right. The violence is only part of the reality. The other reality is a shattered country, with little electricity as the temperatures soar past 100 degrees, with lack of clean running water, and high unemployment.
BAGHDAD, Iraq - In the streets of Baghdad, people wondered Thursday what else could possibly go wrong.
In Karrada, a commercial district across the Tigris River from the city's fortified Green Zone, wreckage was still smoldering hours after four car bombs exploded shortly after dawn, killing 17 people and wounding 20. Water sprayed on the resulting fires commingled in pools with blood. On the north side of the city, in Shuala -- like Karrada, an area populated mostly by Shiite Muslims -- similar scenes played out in the wake of a triple car bombing that had killed 15 people the night before.
Around Baghdad, neighborhoods were celebrating the return of running water but still lamenting the three-day drought caused when insurgents ruptured a water line north of the city.
And with the temperature exceeding 100 degrees, as it has every day for weeks, people voiced anger at the prospect of spending their third summer since the U.S.-led invasion with only intermittent electricity. Those with generators will be able to power air conditioners and other appliances; the rest will simply bake.
"So many problems are happening in the city," said Mohammed Sarhan, 50, a grocer in the southern Baghdad neighborhood of Dora. "Where do I start -- water, electricity, security, unemployment or health?"
"
This is not a life," Sarhan added. "This is hell."
Meanwhile the Vice President, who recently claimed the insurgency was in it's last throes needs a
reality check of his own.
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The lethal ambush of a convoy carrying female U.S. troops in Fallujah underscored the difficulties of keeping women away from the front lines in a war where such boundaries are far from clear-cut.
A suicide car bomber slammed into a 7-ton U.S. military vehicle in Fallujah, killing five Marines and a Navy sailor, Marine Corps sources told NBC News, adding that at least four of the dead were women.
The U.S. military officially confirmed the deaths of four Marines. A Marine and the sailor were missing and presumed dead. Eleven of the 13 wounded troops were female.
The insurgency and it's lethality
continue unabated.
When the President addresses the nation next Tuesday, he is going to need to offer more than "more of the same".
It is time he set forth a real plan.