Tonight in his address to the nation, Bush “tried to turn a corner in the fractious debate over Iraq” by ordering the “first limited troop withdrawals since voters elected an antiwar Congress last year.”

But the move did little to appease Democratic leaders, who dismissed it as a token gesture masking an open-ended commitment of U.S. troops.

Bush said progress on the ground means he can pull out by next summer the additional combat forces he sent in January — roughly 21,700 troops — and he opened the door to further troop reductions if conditions improve. Although the president offered no forecast for how long it will take, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told Washington Post reporters and editors yesterday that current U.S. projections anticipate Iraq reaching nationwide “sustainable security” by June 2009.

Senator John Kerry issued the following statement this evening, in response to the remarks by President Bush:

“Only President Bush could applaud a race back to the starting line when the finish line should be in sight. This is proof positive that the Bush escalation has been a failure. President Bush should acknowledge that the Iraqis have squabbled while American troops fought, squandering the political opportunity our brave soldiers died to create,” said Senator John Kerry. “This is more of the same flawed strategy in the face of overwhelming evidence that there is no military solution to Iraq’s civil war. We must change this disastrous Bush policy, and we must change it now.”

Glen Kessler of the WaPo offers a fact check on Bush’s speech noting that Bush was “citing facts and statistics that at times contradicted recent government reports or his own words.”

For instance, Bush asserted that “Iraq’s national leaders are getting some things done,” such as “sharing oil revenues with the provinces” and allowing “former Baathists to rejoin Iraq’s military or receive government pensions.”

Yet his statement ignored the fact that U.S. officials have been frustrated that none of those actions have been enshrined into law — and that reports from Baghdad this week indicated that a potential deal on sharing oil revenue is collapsing.

In a radio address to the nation less than a month ago, the president himself complained that the Iraqi government was failing to address these issues. “Unfortunately, political progress at the national level has not matched the pace of progress at the local level,” Bush said on Aug. 18. “The Iraqi government in Baghdad has many important measures left to address, such as reforming the de-Baathification laws, organizing provincial elections and passing a law to formalize the sharing of oil revenues.”

Bush also asserted that Baqubah, the capital of Diyala province, was once an al-Qaeda stronghold but that “today, Baqubah is cleared.” But in a meeting with reporters on Aug. 27, the head of the State Department team in Diyala said the security situation was not stable, hampering access to food and energy, though he acknowledged that commerce was returning to Baqubah.

“Everything is based around security; if we have security, then we can bring in agencies like USAID,” John Melvin Jones said, referring to the U.S. Agency for International Development. “It’s going to take a while before the security situation gets stable enough so that you can have a lot of these other agencies involved.”

Bush also thanked “the 36 nations who have troops on the ground in Iraq.” But the State Department’s most recent weekly report on Iraq said there are 25 countries supplying 11,685 troops — about 7 percent of the size of the U.S. forces.

Think Progress notes on the “36 nations” claim that “in the MSNBC post-debate analysis with Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews slammed Bush’s allegations that so many countries were fighting”:

The fact we have 36 countries fighting on our side in Iraq must be news to the soldiers over there. I don’t know who these people are or how many divisions they have. All we read about in the papers are American GIs getting killed by IEDs and terrible accidents and all kinds of enemy action over there. … The idea we’re one of 36 countries fighting the war I think is ludicrous and why the President would throw that out there, I think it only opens him up to ridicule.

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