First crack in the mighty security wall? Note the pollsters spinning a 22-point drop in support as optimistic. LOL.
Security May Not Be Safe Issue for Bush in '04
By Dana Milbank and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 22, 2003; Page A01
The wave of violent death this week in Iraq, Israel, Gaza and Afghanistan brought to the fore a reality that President Bush has been reluctant to discuss: Peace is not at hand.
A confident Bush stood in the Rose Garden less than a month ago, saying, "Conditions in most of Iraq are growing more peaceful," boasting of "dismantling the al Qaeda operation" and pronouncing "pretty good progress" toward Middle East peace and a Palestinian state within two years.
Those sunny characterizations may yet prove true, but Bush allies and foes alike are coming to the conclusion that the progress may not be noticeable by the time Bush faces the voters again in 15 months. For a president who has staked his reputation on making "a tough decision to make the world more peaceful," this could be a big problem.
Both Republican and Democratic strategists have begun adjusting their plans for what they once viewed as unthinkable: that Bush's handling of national security in general, and the war in Iraq in particular, could become a vulnerability rather than an asset in his reelection race.
One presidential adviser said the suicide attacks hours apart in Iraq and Israel, which undermined the two anchors of Bush's ambitious effort to transform the Middle East, made Tuesday "by far the worst political day for Bush since 9/11."
In one of the new Democratic charges, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), ranking minority member on the Foreign Relations Committee, said the images from Iraq are making it ever plainer to the public that Bush's plan for a more peaceful world "has clearly not occurred." On the contrary, he said, "the world is more apprehensive about our leadership."
Bush will have a chance to refine his portrayal of the stakes in postwar Iraq when he addresses a friendly audience of veterans, the American Legion's national convention, Tuesday in Missouri, a crucial state in the presidential race. Some foreign policy experts, even conservatives who support Bush's policy, say he should begin to prepare the country for a long haul. "We should not try to convince people that things are getting better," said former Reagan official Kenneth Adelman, who is close to several Bush officials. "Rather, we should convince people that ours is the age of terrorism."
To be sure, there is plenty of time for events in Iraq and elsewhere in the region to improve, as yesterday's announcement of the capture of Ali Hassan Majeed, Iraq's "Chemical Ali," confirmed. If former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein is killed or captured and the illicit weapons uncovered, it is possible that resistance would fold quickly and U.S. troops could return home.
Even without that, GOP pollsters say, there is no cause for alarm. A poll taken in late July by Public Opinion Strategies found that the number of people calling the war and its aftermath a success had fallen from 85 percent in April but was at a still-strong 63 percent. "Americans are quintessential optimists," said Bill McInturff, who conducted the poll.
Still, after this week's violence, several Republican officials said they are rethinking calculations that Bush's vulnerability is the economy. "A couple of months ago, everyone believed national security was the president's trump card," said one Republican with ties to the White House. "Now, we could be in a position where the economy is growing very nicely, well in advance of the election, and the vulnerability could be on the national security side."
Independent experts see more political trouble than advantage for Bush in Iraq. "There is a substantial potential for the occupation of Iraq to become a deep political problem for Bush," according to Ohio State University's John Mueller, an authority on public opinion and war. If things go well, people will lose interest, but if things go badly, "people are increasingly likely to see the war as a mistake, and starting and continuing wars that people come to consider mistaken does not enhance a president's reelectability."
The matter is politically important to Bush because he has made the peaceful transformation of the Middle East the main justification for war in Iraq. With the failure to find forbidden weapons in Iraq, Bush and his aides have said the invasion of Iraq will allow it to become the linchpin of a stable and democratic Middle East. In one version of this argument, Bush said last week that in deciding to go to war in Iraq, he made "a tough decision to make the world more peaceful." As a result, continued violence in Iraq and the Middle East would deprive the administration of another key justification for the war.
Bush seemed to acknowledge the political importance when he gave himself a deadline for showing results. "We've got a year and a while during my first term to make the world a more peaceful place, and we'll do it," he said earlier this month.
Though Bush has consistently cautioned Americans that the war on terrorism will be long, he has been upbeat about progress. In his May 1 speech proclaiming "victory" in the war in Iraq, he also said "we destroyed the Taliban" in Afghanistan, and predicted that in the war on terrorism, "we do not know the day of final victory, but we have seen the turning of the tide."
Top Bush aides have begun to talk about a long and expensive U.S. presence in the Middle East, a generational commitment akin to the half-century presence in Europe during the Cold War. "Today America and our friends and allies must commit ourselves to a long-term transformation in another part of the world: the Middle East," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice wrote this month in The Washington Post.
Foreign policy expert Richard N. Perle, who has close ties to the administration, recommended that Bush caution Americans about the lengthy commitment. "It may be a very long time before we've so substantially eliminated the source of terror that we can pronounce that we are safe," he said.
Bush, however, has not emphasized that point -- which, opponents say, means Americans may believe that he played down the commitment. "Iraq is going to be a long slog," said Democratic pollster Jeremy Rosner. "He hasn't prepared the nation for the reconstruction of Iraq."
Democrats, while still approaching the subject gingerly, are increasingly willing to take on Bush for his choices overseas.
Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (Mo.) said from the campaign trail in Las Vegas that at event after event, voters who are supportive of the military ask him when the troops will be coming home from Iraq. "The president seems oblivious to the fact that we're over there almost alone," Gephardt said. "We're not getting less violence, we're not getting the country put back together, people are getting killed, and the forces are stretched thin."
Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), former political adviser to President Bill Clinton, said, "Presidents get the benefit of the doubt in any war. But they don't get blind loyalty when Americans think they were given a false sense of security or led into a situation that made them more vulnerable."
Republican officials, while acknowledging this has been a terrible week, say this week's attacks prove Bush's point that he is taking on a global struggle. His advisers say they are not worried that Bush's popularity will be tied to his handling of international relations. Of course, a failed foreign policy would undo Bush as surely as it did President Jimmy Carter during the Iranian hostage crisis, one adviser said. But Bush is a long way from that -- and his allies still believe that Democrats challenge his foreign policy performance at their peril.
"Democrats could find themselves more willing to attack on national security concerns than the economy if we have several months of strong growth and declining unemployment," said Vin Weber, a former Republican House member from Minnesota. "But that will mean they are fighting the campaign on an issue that has long been Republican turf."
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