Politics and War
The president pushes back as a deadly month adds to voters' anxiety
President Bush didn't do much homework to prepare for his news conference on Iraq last week. He spent a few minutes with advisers, who tried to predict the questions that reporters might ask (and got most of them right), but he didn't feel a need to rehearse. Aides saw this as a sign of Bush's expertise. "You have a guy who lives this issue [of Iraq]," White House Press Secretary Tony Snow told U.S. News. "He really thinks about it every day."
That's the kind of confidence that delights the president's allies and unsettles his critics. And it will be on full display this week as Bush makes his final push before the midterm elections. White House advisers say Bush recognizes that it is sagging public support for the Iraq war, more than anything else, that is jeopardizing the Republican majorities in the House and Senate. Most Americans now oppose Bush's policy in Iraq, and 6 in 10 don't think the war was worth fighting in the first place. The latest USA Today/Gallup Poll found that 55 percent think the situation in Iraq is "out of control," and 58 percent say "neither side" is winning.
Rhetorical offensive. To lift his party's candidates, Bush will continue to make his familiar arguments that Iraq is a "central front" in the war on terrorism and, in a series of rallies, attack Democrats for criticizing his policies without offering a clear alternative short of pulling out. The closing theme of Bush's final week on the campaign trail, as described by his advisers: If the Democrats have a better idea, let's hear it. Bush will argue that the situation in Iraq is not nearly as bad as the news media are reporting. And Bush, along with military leaders in Iraq, will point to specific cases of success and courage shown by U.S. soldiers and marines to encourage voters to take heart.
In sum, Bush is gambling that voters will trust him one more time to do the right thing as commander in chief, as they did in 2002 and 2004. At his news conference last week, he admitted to being dissatisfied with how the Iraq venture is going. But he was much less clear about what he will do to make improvements and how much pressure he will exert on the Iraqi government to make reforms.
So far, the changes have been cosmetic. After Democrats began using Bush's catchphrase "stay the course" to portray the president as blindly wedded to a failed policy, White House strategists abandoned the slogan. Snow claimed that Bush hadn't used it much anyway (hardly accurate, since he had used the words on about 30 occasions, according to one TV network's research). This prompted considerable confusion about whether Bush was somehow trying to change the U.S. mission of building a stable, democratic, self-sustaining government in Iraq. But by week's end, the president said he wasn't altering his objective at all, and even Snow was spinning a different tune. "If you mean by 'stay the course,' be steadfast in your mission," Snow told U.S. News, "yeah, we'll stay the course." Added the press secretary: "It is not possible to do rapid, sudden shifting in a time of war. There will be no wrenching change."
October's toll. Even as Bush tried to dig himself out of the Iraq mess at home, the situation on the ground seemed to deteriorate further. As of Friday, 97 American troops had died in Iraq in October, the single most deadly month in a year. More broadly, U.S. commanders are questioning the commitment of the Iraqi government itself-and the apparent disconnect between the wishes of the White House and the will of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
That disconnect was brought into sharp relief last week as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad announced that, at Washington's urging, Maliki had agreed to setting goals for confronting militias and reforming the death squad-infiltrated Ministry of Interior. Maliki publicly responded that he had done no such thing. The White House fired back at the media for supposedly distorting Maliki's remarks. And Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld snapped that the media should "just back off" calls for specific goals from a government still getting its bearings.
But as U.S. casualties mount, U.S. military officials are beginning to think that applying more pressure would be a good idea. They express growing frustration at the willingness of the Iraqi prime minister to talk tough-but only to Washington. "We have every right to put a damn timeline on some stuff," says a senior military official in Baghdad. "If nothing else, it should create a sense of urgency-that's what I would hope."
All the semantics in Washington over benchmarks, timelines, and timetables have only a distant relationship to what is actually going on in Iraq, where Maliki has yet to show he has the ability or the will to rein in even his professed allies. One major issue is his reluctance to confront Moqtada al-Sadr, the powerful anti-American Shiite cleric who has pledged to support the fledgling Iraqi government yet maintains the Mahdi Army, an independent militia that recently took over a town south of Baghdad and controls Baghdad's Sadr City slums.
Yet Maliki's leverage against Sadr seems limited. Sadr was instrumental in making Maliki prime minister, and the young firebrand cleric now controls five ministries and the largest voting bloc in the parliament. So Maliki was incensed after American soldiers conducted a raid in Sadr City to search for a death-squad commander-particularly since the prime minister has promised Sadr autonomy in exchange for political support.
To deal with the rising number of problems, Gen. George Casey, the top U.S commander in Iraq, signaled last week that he may call for more troops to increase security in Baghdad. That move could also lead to increasing the overall level of U.S. troops in the country, currently at 145,000-though Rumsfeld last week rejected the notion that such a statement constituted a call for more troops. Still, the deteriorating condition of the country raises the even more sensitive question of whether to call upon more National Guard and reserve soldiers to bolster an Army and Marine Corps stretched to their limits. Such a call may include reinterpreting the rules by which guardsmen deploy, which currently involve two-year deployment caps.
It's not a very palatable move. But increasingly, it seems that nothing about the war in Iraq ever is.
With Anna Mulrine and Linda Robinson
This story appears in the November 6, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.