Bush touts surge progress in weekly address

President Bush told the nation Saturday that progress is being made in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The surge in Iraq, Bush said in his weekly radio address, “is seizing the initiative from the enemy and handing it to the Iraqi people.” One positive aspect of the initiative, the president stated, is that more Iraqis are coming forward to U.S. troops with intelligence on terrorists hiding within the population.

{mosads}As a measure of military progress, Bush cited the killing of al-Badri, the “mastermind” of the Golden Dome bombing. Al-Badri was killed earlier this month by a coalition air strike.

Bush cautioned that, while the new military strategy is working, political progress “has been slower than we had hoped.”

However, the president cited the $41 billion budget the Iraqi parliament passed to show that the often maligned Iraqi government is working.

Bush also spoke of progress is Afghanistan. He pointed out that Afghan President Hamid Karzai, at a meeting earlier this week at Camp David, said that the Taliban “are not posing any threat to the government of Afghanistan, or to the buildup of institutions in Afghanistan.”

In the Democratic response to the radio address, Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.) attacked Bush and the surge for cutting time between troop deployments.

“Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan spend only 12 months at home for every 15 months in combat,” the lawmaker stated. “The result is that after more than four years of over-extended and frequent deployments we have put our troops and our overall defense readiness at risk.”