WASHINGTON - With less than six months
before the mid-term congressional elections, US
President George W Bush and his top aides are
gambling heavily - some would say recklessly -
that Iraq will not be the political liability for
Republicans that most pundits have believed it
would be.
The White House's apparent
belief that recent events in Iraq - particularly
the killing of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia leader Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi and the filling of the key
security posts in the new government of Prime
Minister Nuri al-Maliki - could really constitute
a turning point in the war has clearly given the
Bush team new confidence that public opinion can
also be turned around by November.
How
else to explain Bush's lightning,
headlines-grabbing trip to Baghdad Tuesday, which
not only tied his political fate ever more
closely to Iraq and the
success of the relatively unknown and untried
Maliki government, but also put far more pressure
on uneasy Republican lawmakers to rally behind the
president's policy during this week's
unprecedented debate in the House of
Representatives.
That the Bush team intends
to embrace, rather than play down, Iraq in
the upcoming political campaign was also
underlined by the highly partisan speech given on
Monday by his top political aide, Karl Rove. Rove,
who had just been told that he would not, after
all, be indicted by a special prosecutor for his
role in leaking the name of a clandestine Central
Intelligence Agency officer, warned that with the
Democrats in control, Iraq would be overrun by
terrorists like Zarqawi.
"When it gets
tough, and when it gets difficult, they fall back
on that party's old pattern of cutting and
running," Rove declared in what could only be
called a provocation calculated not only to throw
the Democrats on the defensive in the
congressional debate, but also to play on their
internal divisions on the issue.
Indeed,
the White House appears to be intent on using
Democratic disunity and incoherence over what to
do in Iraq to persuade voters come November that,
at the very least, Republicans are committed to a
strategy, flawed as it may be. That would be a
reprise of its constant attacks against Senator
John Kerry, Bush's Democratic challenger in 2004,
as a "flip-flopper" who at the time both denounced
the war but opposed withdrawal.
While
Kerry's position has since evolved - he is now
pushing for a six-month deadline for withdrawal -
the Democrats as a party remain, as the head of
the National Republican Congressional Committee
put it this week, "all over the lot" on Iraq, a
fact that has increasingly become the focus of
critical media coverage in recent weeks.
While all Democrats assail the
administration's incompetence in carrying out the
war, the party is deeply divided over what to do
about it.
Following the lead of John
Murtha, a 37-year Marine Corps veteran with
long-standing ties to the uniformed military, and
almost half of House Democrats, including Minority
Leader Nancy Pelosi, have called for a
"redeployment" of all US troops out of Iraq by the
end of the year.
The rest in the House,
as well as a clear majority of Senate Democrats,
are divided between those who want to begin
such redeployment by the end of this year and
those, like the front-runner for Democratic presidential
nomination in 2008, Senator Hillary Clinton,
oppose setting any kind of timetable for
withdrawal.
"I have to just say it,"
she told an unhappy meeting of Democratic
activists this week, "I do not think it is a smart
strategy either for the president to continue with
his open-ended commitment [in Iraq] ... nor do I
think it is smart strategy to set a date certain"
for withdrawal, she said.
To Rove, Iraq
is a "wedge" issue par excellence - one that can
be used to drive deep philosophical divisions
among the Democrats of the kind that ended the
party's nearly 40-year political hegemony when
Richard Nixon defeated vice president Hubert
Humphrey for the presidency in 1968.
According to this view, the split between
liberal interventionists and anti-war forces that
opened 40 years ago over the Vietnam War, if
carefully manipulated, could yet prove fruitful
for Republicans, provided, of course, that they
remain united behind the president and the
situation in Iraq between now and next November
offers new glimmers of hope.
Of course,
those are very big ifs, and in that respect
Bush, the failed oil speculator, is showing
himself once again to be a high-stakes gambler.
Since Zarqawi's death, he has tried hard to
play down expectations of any quick end to the
violence in Iraq, but there can be little doubt of
the administration's new confidence.
Bush's trip to Baghdad was obviously
calculated to focus the US mass media on the two
positive events there during the previous week -
Zarqawi's killing and the completion of Maliki's
government. It also aimed to raise the curtain on
a series of other steps, most notably a new
initiative to curb violence in the capital by
deploying unprecedented numbers of Iraqi troops,
designed to reduce tangibly prospects for civil
war.
Designed by US Ambassador Zalmay
Khalilzad and the head of US forces in Iraq,
General George Casey, Washington's strategy will
also focus on negotiating deals, including
amnesty, with Sunni insurgents and rehabilitating
former Ba'athists at a much faster rate in hopes
of integrating them into the "government of
national unity".
Similarly, the spate of
reports that Washington will not go through with
plans to draw down at least 30,000 of the
approximately 130,000 US troops in Iraq by the
November elections, as well as growing talk by
senior officials about retaining as many as 50,000
US troops there beyond 2009, makes clear that Bush
is now more committed to his Iraq adventure than
ever.
But Bush's confidence will have to
compete with persistent public skepticism and
concern about accumulating costs in both blood and
treasure. Indeed, on the same day that the Iraq
debate got underway on Thursday in the House, the
Pentagon reported that the US military death toll
in Iraq since March 2003 had reached a new
benchmark: 2,500.
Several national
polls taken since then have shown - consistent with
most pollsters' predictions - a bounce of about
4 percentage points from the high 30s to the low
40s in public confidence that the war was going
well compared with two months before, although another
found that approval in Bush's performance remained
unchanged at 37%.
For Bush's gamble to
work, he will need a lot more good news out of
Iraq over an extended period of time. That, and
continued incoherence on the issue from the
Democrats.
