December 9, 2005

With the U.S. military fatalities in Iraq, numerous political analysts and most of the Americans themselves have become more doubtful about winning the war.

According to an article by James Klurfeld published on Newsday.com, the U.S. President George W. Bush has lost his credibility on IRAQ war. Nothing, the article continues, could have damaged the president's political viability more than this illegal, unjustified and bloody war.

Karl Rove and his associates have embarked on a mission aimed at reversing the downward trend of opinion polls on the war. It started with the President Bush’s speech at the Naval Academy last week, in which he tried to soothe the worries of the angry American nation, and continued this week at the Council on Foreign Relations. The significance of those two speeches by the White House is that they’re made shortly before the Iraqi parliamentary elections scheduled to be held on the 15th of this month.

Both speeches were another attempt by the American President to save his image tarnished by the disclosure of a series of scandals involving his administration’s policy in IRAQ.

Yesterday's Council on Foreign Relations speech "was aimed at the foreign policy elites who have a powerful role in shaping public opinion on these complex matters," the article adds. However the speech failed to deliver the aimed message, and that due to its realistic admission of what has worked and what has not worked so far in trying to rebuild post-war IRAQ.

Its admission of false starts and dead ends is "especially noteworthy for a president whose vocabulary seemed to be missing the word mistake".

But for a President to regain credibility, he must himself be credible, something BUSH can’t afford.

A recent analysis on the Knight Ridder Newspapers, says that the Bush administration’s statistics prove that the Iraqi resistance is getting tougher than ever. It’s become increasingly difficult for the U.S. army to beat those fighters, the Detroit Free Press, owned by Knight Ridder, reported Saturday.

Among factors mentioned in the analysis is; the fact that the U.S. military casualties rose from an average of about 17 per month in May 2003 to a current average of 82 per month, also the average number of U.S. soldiers harmed by hostile acts per month has jumped from 142 to 808 during the same period.

Moreover, the number of attacks targeting the American invaders since November 2003 rose from 735 a month to 2,400 in October, and the number of mass-casualty bombings grew from zero in the first few months of the war to an average of 13 per month.

"All the trend lines we can identify are all in the wrong direction," said Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, a Washington policy research organization.

The American President will never be able to regain credibility if it turns out that the actual situation in IRAQ is far from the picture he paints.