Diverging Views of the Year Since Declaration of War’s End

WASHINGTON —  A year after declaring an end to major combat operations in Iraq, President Bush conceded Friday that U.S. troops have faced “some tough fighting” against insurgents there, but he insisted that “we’re making progress, you bet,” toward stabilizing the war-torn nation.

Democrats used the anniversary of Bush’s appearance aboard an aircraft carrier May 1, 2003 -- when he stood under a banner saying “Mission Accomplished” -- to highlight the heavy toll from a war they consider ill-conceived.

“Much as we had hoped the end of major combat signaled the beginning of a more peaceful period of reconstruction, the president’s assertion of ‘mission accomplished’ was tragically premature,” Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank) said in a statement.

Bush took note of the anniversary of his speech during a brief question-and-answer session in the White House Rose Garden, with visiting Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin at his side.

“A year ago, I did give the speech from the carrier, saying that we had achieved an important objective, that we’d accomplished a mission, which was the removal of Saddam Hussein,” the president said. “And as a result, there are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves in Iraq. As a result, a friend of terror has been removed.”

He dismissed the uprisings in Fallouja and elsewhere in Iraq as the work of small band of anti-democracy zealots and terrorists, saying: “We will deal with them, those few who are stopping the hopes of many.”

In April alone, at least 130 American soldiers died in Iraq amid growing violence, more than the number killed during the six-week war that overthrew Hussein’s regime.

When Bush landed on the carrier Abraham Lincoln off the San Diego coast, it seemed as if the event was ready-made for a Bush reelection campaign commercial.

But in the intervening 12 months, hundreds of American soldiers have been killed. Although Hussein was captured and is awaiting trial, no weapons of mass destruction, whose purported existence was cited by the U.S. and its allies as justification for invasion, have been found.

White House officials have said that it was the Lincoln’s crew, homeward bound after a yearlong deployment, who suggested the “Mission Accomplished” banner, and that the White House had merely gone along. In mid-April, Karl Rove, the president’s top political strategist, acknowledged in an interview with the Columbus Dispatch newspaper in Ohio: “I wish the banner was not up there.”

In the Rose Garden on Friday, Bush told reporters that American sacrifices “will not go in vain, because there will be a free Iraq.”

He said that a democratic Iraq would be in the interest of regional and world peace.

The president also noted that in his address to the nation a year ago he had warned of the “still difficult work ahead.”

“And we’ve faced tough times in Iraq,” Bush said Friday. “We’ve had some tough fighting, because there are people who hate the idea of a free Iraq. They’re trying to stop progress, because they understand what freedom means to their terrorist ambitions.”

To further emphasize the May 1 anniversary, Democrats have called on an Army officer who served in Iraq to deliver their response to the president’s weekly Saturday radio address.