The War Comes Home
Seething anger--and looming new doubts
Another wave of deadly bombings in Baghdad. An embarrassing delay in approving an Iraqi constitution. Saturation coverage of Cindy Sheehan's dramatic antiwar protest. Rising voter doubts about the Iraq occupation and an ongoing decline in President Bush's job performance ratings.
It hasn't been a very pleasant August for the commander in chief so far--certainly not the idyllic five-week vacation he envisioned when he started chopping cedar and riding a mountain bike at his Texas ranch as the month began. And while Bush is scheduled to hit the road this week trying to reverse the slide, it's unlikely to make much difference. There seems to be a deepening sense of unease among Americans about U.S. involvement in Iraq, adding up to an unexpected summer of discontent and, quite possibly, an unhappy watershed for the Bush presidency.
"The problem is the slow loss of people's confidence that things are going well in Iraq," says a senior White House strategist. A former adviser to two previous Republican presidents adds: "Bush's credibility is at stake. Because of Iraq, his leadership on all other issues gets questioned. And it appears that Bush doesn't want to hear from anybody who opposes him. Bush and his people have charted a course, decided they're right and [that] God is on their side. But people are asking, 'What's the strategy for winning? When will we see progress?' "
Slow going. Progress was certainly hard to find last week, as scores more Americans and Iraqis were killed in a continuing series of insurgent attacks and as Iraqi politicans failed to reach agreement on a constitution by an August 15 deadline. The failure to approve the constitution could well be reversed this week, but the setback was the latest psychological blow to the Bush administration's hopes for building momentum toward an eventual drawdown of U.S. troops. The biggest obstacle appears to be the ethnic and sectarian divide among Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. Hopes for compromise were damaged in particular by the demands by Kurds for wide-ranging autonomy and by lack of agreement on the status of women in Iraqi society. U.S. officials are still optimistic about an agreement, even though such a "solution" would almost certainly mean delaying resolution of the most contentious issues.
U.S. officials now concede that their original goals for Iraq were overly ambitious. The training of Iraqi security forces, arguably the administration's highest priority, has been seriously flawed. Only a fraction of Iraq's security forces are considered battle ready. "The training is not going all that well," concedes a State Department official. U.S. News has learned that in some instances, sessions with U.S. trainers and Iraqi recruits in Jordan have devolved into small melees sparked by what one official calls "culture clashes."
Back home, the public seems upset not just by casualties but by the entire war effort. "People see it as one big thing, which is a mess," says a senior administration adviser. "People ask, 'When is it going to be calm or peaceful? Give us a sense it's going well.' "
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