President Bush Supports Pause in Iraq Drawdown

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Bush Embraces Petraeus's Recommendation

President Bush has ordered a halt in U.S. troop withdrawals from Iraq after July, embracing the recommendation of his top commander in the war. Bush says that Gen. David Petraeus will 'have all the time he needs.'

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Crocker said Sadr's movement "has significant roots in Iraqi political life" going back to the 1990s. "It is an important element in the Iraqi landscape, and certainly as a political movement, no, I would not consider it our enemy," he said.

A questioner pressed the two on how Sadr would not be considered a U.S. enemy in light of a recent interview in which the fiery Shiite cleric told the al-Jazeera Arabic television network that it was all right to shoot American occupiers, just not in cities where Iraqi civilians might get hurt.

"Well, certainly, anybody who shoots at our forces, at Iraqi forces or innocent civilians has to be dealt with," Petraeus said. He suggested that those doing so were "cloaking their actions in the name of what, again, is a respected movement, a nationalist movement, and one that is known for having reached out over the years to the poor and downtrodden in Iraq, that stayed in Iraq during the Saddam Hussein period and suffered greatly at its hands."

The Maliki government launched an offensive late last month against the Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias and criminal gangs that officials said had taken control of the southern oil hub of Basra, Iraq's second largest city.

In his White House speech, Bush praised the Basra offensive as showing that "a free Iraq will no longer tolerate lawlessness by Iranian-backed militants." He also said that Iraq faces "a serious challenge" from "the destructive influence of Iran," as well as from al-Qaeda.

In announcing that he was reducing Army combat tours from 15 months to 12 months, Bush moved to return deployments to the duration that was in effect before he ordered about 30,000 reinforcements to Iraq last year. He said the new reduced tours would apply to active-duty Army personnel deploying after Aug. 1 and pledged that Army units would have at least a year at home for every year they spend in the field.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates extended the Army tours a year ago to provide enough forces for the surge, which was aimed at tamping down rampant sectarian and insurgent violence in Baghdad and other parts of Iraq, notably Anbar province. The buildup helped reduce the violence substantially, but Army leaders complained that the longer deployments were imposing major strains.

"The stress on our force is real, but the Joint Chiefs have assured me that our all-volunteer force is strong and resilient enough to fight and win this war on terror," Bush said, adding, "I believe the surest way to depress morale and weaken the force would be to lose in Iraq."

He called on Congress to pass a new defense bill "that does not tie the hands of our commanders or impose artificial timelines for withdrawal" from Iraq. And he cautioned against exceeding the "reasonable" $108 billion request he sent to Congress.

Bush acknowledged complaints in Washington "that the war costs too much money." But he asserted that the "relative costs" of other wars have been higher. For example, he said, the defense budget amounted to 13 percent of U.S. gross domestic product during the height of the Cold War.

Today, he said, "our defense budget accounts for just over 4 percent of our economy, less than at any point during the four decades of the Cold War." He called this "a modest fraction of our nation's wealth" and said it "pales when compared to the cost of another terrorist attack on our people."

"We should be able to agree that this is a burden worth bearing," Bush said.