Press Briefing by Tony Snow

Business Wire, Sept 12, 2007

Q My question, then, if there has been such significant change, why can't you pull out more than the surged troops?

MR. SNOW: Because you still have a big country and you still have challenges ahead of you, Ed. Again, the strategy that General Petraeus is pursuing is one that is designed to produce results and to produce the kind of stability that the Iraqi people deserve. It is not one that is gauged at numbers.

Martha.

Q You've said you can't tell when the war will end. General Petraeus said that, as well. But the President has also said it is not an open-ended commitment. So square those things and also tell where the pressure is on the Iraqis' with statements like that?

MR. SNOW: Sure. Number one, you don't know when the war is going to end because you don't know when the war is going to end -- you don't have a crystal ball. I mean, you could have asked Eisenhower when the war was going to end and he wouldn't have known. You could have asked generals and -- the fact is, you just --

Q Right. Right. But you've also said --

MR. SNOW: But when you're asking --

Q -- not open-ended. I mean, certainly you can't predict when something is going to end, but you've said there is no open-ended commitment. So where is the pressure on the Iraqis, in any of this, for change?

MR. SNOW: First, you're assuming that the Iraqis, themselves, don't want change, and I think the events on the ground indicate that the Iraqis, themselves -- especially the grassroots level -- have had a significant change of heart. What you're asking about I think is the political --

Q Right. But at the national level and the benchmarks that everybody seems to have forgotten, the 18 benchmarks -- and now you're talking about Anbar, it's almost you're redefining success.

MR. SNOW: No. Look, benchmarks were something that Congress wanted to use as a metric --

Q You signed off on it.

MR. SNOW: -- and we're going to produce a report. But the fact is that the situation is bigger and more complex, and you need to look at the whole picture.

But let's talk about some pressure on the Iraqis. Number one, I've just talked about the fact that you've got these grassroots movements. Do you not think that people in Iraq, themselves, are putting pressure on the political system? My sense is that they probably are. Number two, the President has made it absolutely clear that he expects to see political progress, and he's made it clear to the Iraqis that within the American political system there is an insistence that the political factions within Iraq figure out how to get together on important pieces of legislation. Again --

Q But, Tony, he's done that for a long time, and there is no real significant political progress on the national level.

MR. SNOW: Well, actually -- General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker pointed out some interesting things that have been going on at the national level, without necessarily the enactment of national legislation. For instance, there's a lot of talk about the oil law, when do you come up with a hydrocarbon law. Well, it turns out the government has been redistributing oil and natural gas revenues to provinces --