The President's news conference

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, May 2, 2005

I had a good videoconference recently with General Casey and General Petraeus. General Casey is in charge of the theater; General Petraeus, as you know, is in charge of training. And they were upbeat about what they're seeing with the Iraqi troops.

One of the questions I like to ask is, "Are they able to recruit?" In other words, you hear--you see these killers will target recruiting stations, and I've always wondered whether or not that has had an effect on the ability for the Iraqis to draw their fellow citizens into the armed forces. Recruitment is high. It's amazing, isn't it, that people want to serve; they want their country to be free.

The other question that--one of the other issues that is important is the equipping issue, and the equipment is now moving quite well. In other words, troops are becoming equipped.

Thirdly, a fundamental problem has been whether or not there's an established chain of command, whether or not a civilian Government can say to the military, "Here's what you need to do," and whether the command goes from top to bottom and the plans get executed. And General Petraeus was telling me he's pleased with the progress being made with setting up a command structure, but there's still more work to be done.

One of the real dangers, David, is that as polities takes hold in Iraq, whether or not the civilian Government will keep intact the military structure that we're now helping them develop. And my message to the Prime Minister and our message throughout Government to the Iraqis is: Keep stability; don't disrupt the training that has gone on; don't politicize your military, in other words; have them there to help secure the people.

So we're making good progress. We've reduced our troops from 160,000, more or less, to 139,000. As you know, I announced to the country that we would step up our deployments--step up deployments and retain some troops for the elections. And then I said we'd get them out, and we've done that. In other words, the withdrawals that I said would happen, have happened.

Go ahead; I can see you've got a follow-up right there on the tip of your tongue.

Troop levels/North Korea.

Q. Do you feel that the number of troops that you've kept there is limiting your options elsewhere in the world? Just today you had the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency say that he was now concerned that the North Koreans, for example, could put a weapon, a nuclear weapon, on a missile that could reach Japan or beyond. Do you feel, as you are confronting these problems, the number of troops you've left tied up in Iraq is limiting your options to go beyond the diplomatic solutions that you've described for North Korea and Iran?

The President. No, I appreciate that question. The person to ask that to, the person I ask that to, at least, is to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, my top military adviser. I say, "Do you feel that we've limited our capacity to deal with other problems because of our troop levels in Iraq?" And the answer is no, he doesn't feel we're limited. He feels like we've got plenty of capacity.