The best way to "reduce the risks to our soldiers" is to bring them home, but that wouldn't achieve our actual goals. Our actual strategic goals are to defeat the terrorists and Sunni dead-end insurgents, and to help stablize the nation so a new democratic government and society can be sustained, so that democracy and freedom can take root in the Middle East, thereby changing the entire equation there which has resulted in the rise of Islamist extremism. And Bush needs to hammer this home.
Liberals think the job of the government is to make the lives of the military as safe as possible. Ergo, never put them in harms way.
Conservatives think the job of the government is to make the lives of the American public as safe as possible. If the job of the military can be made safer, all the better.