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The president meets Tony Blair today amid criticism of how the postwar occupation is being handled, but his Democratic opponents have found it hard to turn the White House's discomfort to their advantage, says James Harding
On the day after Saddam Hussein was captured in December, an American official laid out the planned Iraqi political calendar for 2004 over a cup of tea in the coalition headquarters in Baghdad. At the time, it seemed to mesh in nicely with President George W. Bush's re-election schedule.
In February, with the Democrats in full primary frenzy, there would be the signing of the "Fundamental Law", a step on the road back to self-government. Iraqis would be gaining their first taste of democracy in caucuses to elect a national assembly.
In March, when the Democratic candidate had been chosen, the US and the Iraqis would finalise an agreement on future troop deployment. The expectation in Baghdad, the official said, was that US troop numbers would fall from 120,000 towards a few tens of thousands. Then, at the end of June, just before the Democratic and Republican Party conventions, the US-led occupation would end. Iraqis would regain sovereignty of a country set on the course to freedom and prosperity.
Plainly, things have gone badly awry. The Iraqi basic law was, eventually, signed, but only after walkouts and bombings. The caucuses were scrapped. The US military is asking for more, not fewer, soldiers at the end of the bloodiest month since the invasion.
The White House is still insisting on the June 30 transfer of power, but it is unclear whether Iraqis will buy into a sovereignty that involves a government installed by foreigners, an economy driven by US dollars and a state policed by US armed forces.
"There's no question it's been a tough, tough series of weeks for the American people," Bush said in a prime-time press conference recently, intended to strengthen the wavering resolve of an American public confronted with .... of hostages and charred ......... reports of hundreds of dead Iraqi civilians and a US military body count that has rapidly risen to nearly 700. "It's been really tough for the families, I understand that. It's been tough on this administration."
The polls show that Iraq is suddenly weighing more heavily on Bush's chances of a second term. When asked to name the most important problem facing the US in an AP-Ipsos poll last July, 9 per cent of people said war. The latest poll shows that proportion is now 17 per cent. The economy was ranked the main issue by 31 per cent in July; now it is 18 per cent.
Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shia Muslim cleric who has championed what is in effect an urban guerrilla war against US-led forces, is seeking to influence the 2004 election campaign. In a sermon read on his behalf recently, Sadr said: "I address my enemy, Bush - you are now fighting an entire nation, from north to south, from east to west, and we advise you to withdraw from Iraq or you will lose the elections you are now struggling for."
The collision of Iraq policy and US election-year politics has not, in fact, been as dramatic as might be expected given the grisly pictures on the nightly news. Bush's poll ratings vis-à-vis John Kerry, his challenger, have barely budged: the Battleground 2004 poll released recently, for example, showed Kerry's support at 49 per cent and Bush's at 48 per cent.
Kerry's prospects of capitalising on the troubles in Iraq have been handicapped by the fact that the Massachusetts senator voted for the Congressional resolution authorising the president to go to war. His challenges to the Bush administration recently have only served to show how fraught the issue is for the opposition. Making the bold call for withdrawal is seen as political suicide. "Kerry cannot give George Bush the opportunity to go after the swing voters by doing a Howard Dean and calling for the troops to come home," says Ivo Daalder, who served on Bill Clinton's National Security Council, referring to the former front running Democrat candidate. "It would open him up to the attack that he is irresponsible."
Instead, the Kerry criticism has been focused on detail rather than vision calls for more troops, a clearer UN role and greater international involvement. The intention is to play on the sense that Bush has dented US standing in the world and that Kerry has the international credibility to restore it. But the Bush campaign has pointed out that Kerry is only echoing the president by offering more troops and engaging the UN. And whatever criticism Kerry makes, he becomes vulnerable to charges of being unpatriotic.
Like so much else in a polarised nation, the unfolding events in the Gulf seem only to entrench already partisan positions. Last month the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg Election Survey showed that 79 per cent of Republicans approved of Bush's handling of the Iraq situation, while 20 per cent disapproved; 22 per cent of Democrats approved, while 74 per cent of them disapproved.
But the Sadr militia has demonstrated more - forcefully than Hussein's regime ever did that Bush's high-minded purpose in Iraq may yet be undone by ham-fisted implementation. The national conversation in the US has moved beyond the philosophy of pre-emption and the debate about weapons of mass destruction. Questions concerning the president's credibility are now about his administration's competence.
Has Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, understaffed the Iraq operation? For months, members of Congress and the television studio generals who have played such a part in this war have complained that Rumsfeld's stubborn faith in a quick, light US military has meant forces are there in inadequate numbers to stabilise Iraq.
The Pentagon conceded the need for more soldiers yesterday, as it issued orders requiring 20,000 soldiers, due to return to their home bases this month, to extend their tours of duty by about three months - a breach of the commitment made last autumn that troop assignments in Iraq would be limited to 12 months.
The military - 1.4m active-duty personnel and their families - tends to vote Republican by a roughly 2-to-1 margin (according to the inexact science of measuring the voting patterns of soldiers, who are barred from participating in voter polls). Anecdotal evidence suggests this significant voting bloc is not yet deserting the president's party but is beginning to show the strain. A few dozen military families, several of which had lost loved ones in Iraq, staged one of an increasing number of protests outside the White House this month, calling on Bush to bring the troops home.
Has Paul Bremer, the civil administrator in Iraq, overplayed his hand? Initially, the former diplomat's polished, upbeat media performances and the sense of determination he brought to the Coalition Provisional Authority won him applause in Washington. But, increasingly, his style of leadership is receiving unfavourable reviews.
Bremer's ambitious political programme had to be abandoned for lack of support from the most senior Shia clerics in Iraq. His decision to disband the Iraqi military as part of a "de Beatification" process has been reversed by the US military leadership, as the Iraqi armed forces have shied away from the fighting in Falluja and the south.
Most significantly, Bremer's call last month to shut down al-Hawsa, the newspaper run by Sadr's supporters, while leaving the man and his militia at large is blamed for giving the cleric an opportunity to paint himself as a victim of US persecution and rally Iraqis to his anti-American cause.
That leads to the anxious question: is the US operation quelling or stirring anti-American feeling? Coalition officials say large parts of the country are peaceful and, increasingly, prosperous. But there are concerns on two fronts. First, that the suppression of the Sadr militia is killing so many civilians that it is driving moderate Iraqis into the militant camp. According to Anthony Cordesman, scholar in military strategy at the Centre for Strategic and International studies, the coalition forces "must conduct military operations in ways that take more bad guys off the streets than they create".
Second, following Wednesday's endorsement by Bush of the plan by Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, for permanent annexation of certain West Bank settlements, there are also fears that a Middle East policy seen to be tilted towards Israel is stoking anti-US sentiment in Iraq and the Arab world.
The overriding operational question, though, is: who will be- governing Iraq on July V The Bush administration, which has been so mistrustful of the UN, is now putting its faith in a future political arrangement overseen by Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN special envoy to Iraq.
The suspicions of the UN still run deep in the Bush camp. Casper Weinberger, formerly Ronald Reagan's defence secretary, was recruited this week to speak on behalf of the BushCheney '04 campaign in support of the president's Iraq policy. "The UN is totally incapable of pacifying or removing terrorism in a country like Iraq," he said. "It was Kofi Annan who pulled out the small UN delegation after the first bullet went off a few months ago."
But when Bush meets Tony Blair at the White House today, the emphasis will be squarely on the UN's role not the rhetorical "vital role" that the White House originally assigned the UN, but an active, architectural participation in creating a legitimate Iraqi government.
British officials, speaking in private, have been keen to get some credit for Bush's eventual embrace of the UN. The prime minister was set to see Annan, the UN secretary-general, for dinner last night. But the Bush administration is turning to Brahimi out of necessity. For domestic political reasons, for the safety of US troops and for the legitimacy of the incoming Iraqi government' it makes sense to take a US face off the Iraqi operation.
Brahimi's plans provide some grounds for optimism in Washington. He has proposed establishing a caretaker government to replace the fractious and unpopular interim governing council selected by the US-led coalition. He has set out a series of steps to get to elected government by the end of 2005. And, amid the anxieties in Washington and the west about Bush's insistence on a June 30 handover, he has said he thinks a return to Iraqi sovereignty in six weeks is feasible.
"Admitting that the situation is uncertain scarcely means that all of the possible problems will take their most serious form," says Cordesman. "Much still depends on the skill with which the US and its allies execute the transfer of sovereignty, the aid programme and the political aspects of military operations over the next days, weeks and months."
These are precisely the issues that will dominate the discussions today between Bush and Blair as elections draw near for both. Jose Maria Aznar, who as Spanish prime minister backed the two men's stance, has already suffered an election defeat partly blamed on public opposition to the Iraq war. Blair is expected to seek another term in elections to be called probably in May next year. Americans go to the polls on November 2.
In the startled excitement of Hussein's capture in Baghdad last December, the official working in the Iraqi leader's cavernous palace had one further forecast for 2004. Probably some time between the Republican National Convention in New York at the beginning of September and election day, he said, Hussein's televised trial would begin. It would remake the case for Hussein's forced removal - the gassing of Kurds, the torture chambers, the mass graves and the foreign wars with all the drama of the courtroom.
The military is still interrogating the former dictator. Some 50 lawyers and investigators from the US Department of Justice are in Baghdad helping Iraqis put together a case. They still aim to bring it in the second half of the year. So far, though, few things have gone quite to plan.
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