Don’t ‘Pack Up,’ Bush Says After 4 Years of War

WASHINGTON, March 19 — President Bush marked the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq on Monday with a plea for patience and a stark warning against the temptation "to pack up and go home."

Mr. Bush's brief speech came in the midst of an increasingly tense showdown with the Democratic-controlled Congress over the constitutional balance of power during war. The House is scheduled to vote Thursday on a Democratic proposal to attach conditions to the president's $100 billion war financing package that would require American combat troops to be withdrawn from Iraq next year, a timetable Mr. Bush has said would undercut the troops and aid the insurgents.

Mr. Bush's commemoration of the anniversary, delivered beneath a portrait of Theodore Roosevelt as a Rough Rider, was notable for the sharp change in tone from his speeches in the heady, early days of the war — when it still appeared possible that a quick victory in Baghdad could be followed by a relatively swift withdrawal. In those first few months, Mr. Bush argued that he was on the way to spreading democracy throughout the Middle East through the euphoria that would surely follow the unseating of Saddam Hussein.

But on Monday Mr. Bush made no reference to democracy. In his only reference to the regional effects of the war, he cautioned, "If American forces were to step back from Baghdad before it is more secure, a contagion of violence could engulf the entire country; in time, this violence could engulf the region."

In an echo of the initial case for war, Mr. Bush warned that Iraq could become a staging ground for terrorists to plan devastating attacks on the order of 9/11.

Anniversaries of the invasion have become more politically fraught in the years since the invasion. Mr. Bush used his statement on Monday to argue that it was the responsibility of Congress to support the troops already there, and that he alone had the authority to decide the strategy and the timetable for adding or withdrawing troops.

"They have a responsibility to get this bill to my desk without strings and without delay," Mr. Bush said of the war financing package.

Also on Monday, the administration released a statement calling the House bill "unconscionable" and saying that the president would veto it if it was passed.

But where Democrats once feared they were vulnerable to charges that they were undercutting the troops by defying the commander in chief, they expressed no such concern on Monday. Reflecting Mr. Bush's low approval ratings and the widespread discontent with continuing American casualties, they used the anniversary on Monday to go on the attack.

"After four years of failure in Iraq, the president's only answer is to do more of the same," Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said in a statement. Referring to Republican efforts to defeat a resolution in the Senate calling for a 2008 troop withdrawal, Mr. Reid added, "With the blessing of Senate Republicans, he's committing more U.S. troops to an open-ended civil war."

Democrats are hardly unified on the war: some are concerned that Democrats could be blamed for whatever happens in Iraq if Congress specified dates for withdrawal.

In the mid-1990s, President Clinton regularly clashed with Republicans in Congress as they sought to limit United States involvement in United Nations peacekeeping missions, leading to charges from Mr. Clinton that Congress was infringing on presidential war powers.

The Iran-contra affair during President Reagan's term was itself a reaction to Congressional restrictions on the United States involvement in Nicaragua's civil war.

But the most direct parallel might be Vietnam, when Congress tried to limit presidential maneuvering room as protests over the war increased in volume — including the 1970 repeal of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that was an important part of Congressional assent for the United States involvement in the war.

It remains unclear whether the House Democrats will have the votes to approve the bill tying funding of the war to benchmarks and the goal of a 2008 withdrawal. "We're in the hunt," said Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the Democratic conference chairman.

Mr. Bush's explicit reference to the temptation to leave Iraq was in sharp contrast to other moments when he has commemorated milestones in the war. His well-known statement aboard the aircraft carrier Lincoln in the late spring of 2003 — declaring an end to active combat — was a celebration of what initially looked like a quick military victory. But that was before the rise of the insurgency and counterattacks by Shiite militias.

In 2003, both White House and Pentagon officials said that any American presence in Iraq four years later would most likely be relatively small. On Monday, the White House was instead pressing anew its claims that withdrawal would result in defeat.

"It is a withdraw-the-troops bill, not a fund-the-troops bill," Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, said of the Congressional legislation during a news briefing that followed Mr. Bush's remarks. "It would also force failure of the mission in Iraq and forfeit the sacrifices made by our troops."

In keeping with the political jockeying of the day, Mr. Snow attacked the bill for also including several items of political pork, presumably inserted to secure votes of the faint of heart.

But Mr. Snow faced skepticism from reporters on Monday, fencing with them over a new poll of Iraqis showing that they hold a gloomy view of the future. At one point Mr. Snow snapped, "Zip it" during an argument with a CNN reporter over whether the administration could provide a "recipe for success" at a time when it was portraying the Democrats as putting forward a recipe for failure.

White House officials on Monday said the political pressure to leave Iraq would abate when conditions on the ground appeared more positive.

But officials acknowledge that they are in a race between better results in Iraq and a Democratic Congress beginning to insert itself in decisions about war and peace.