As war worsens, White House alters message

As war worsens, White House alters message
By Jim Rutenberg
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: August 6, 2006

WASHINGTON Late last year, during a major address in Annapolis, Maryland, President George W. Bush introduced a new phrase for his Iraq policy: "Plan for Victory." With those words emblazoned on a screen behind him, he laid out a possible exit path for U.S. troops, who would gradually cede control to their Iraqi counterparts.

But that phrase has all but disappeared as scenes of horrific sectarian violence have streamed onto American television screens unabated. And when the U.S. commander for the Middle East, General John Abizaid, addressed the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday, his testimony that "Iraq could move toward civil war" if the strife did not end overshadowed any talk of victory.

Those two words - civil war - further complicated a daunting challenge for the administration: convincing battle-weary Americans that the war is winnable while acknowledging the grim reality of the bloodshed.

Bringing the public back behind the Iraq campaign has been a fundamental White House goal for at least the past year, crucial to reducing public pressure to withdraw troops before the White House believes the mission is complete. It would also bolster the Republican Party's prospects during congressional elections in November.

But the administration is, to a point, still battling early expectations - created in part by its own officials and supporters - that the fight will be relatively easy. And it must essentially make a retroactive argument that the campaign will be long and hard, with stakes that no longer address the threat of unconventional weapons that were never found but, rather, the prospects for the fight between democracy and Islamic extremism in the Middle East.

Since the war began more than three years ago, the administration and its supporters have discussed it in terms that have progressively tamped down expectations. The long-derided terms like "greeted as liberators" (Vice President Dick Cheney) and "cakewalk" (Kenneth Adelman, an arms-control official in the Reagan administration), as well as talk of an insurgency in its "last throes" (Cheney), are a thing of memory.

Now, mixed with optimism are statements from Bush that "the violence in Baghdad is still terrible" and from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the United States had made "tactical errors, thousands of them."

But on Thursday, the administration faced a blunt warning about the possibility of a civil war in Iraq from one of its military leaders.

For some who have watched the public-relations campaign closely, Abizaid's statement - which did include an assertion that Iraq would ultimately avoid a civil war - represented a tacit acknowledgment that there was no use spinning this conflict.
Yet it also risked feeding public calls to leave Iraq when Americans are especially supportive of a speedy troop withdrawal if the conflict devolves into an internal Iraqi war.

"'Civil war' is sort of a proxy term for wars we cannot win," said Christopher Gelpi, a professor of political science at Duke University who has worked on gauging opinions on Iraq with Peter Feaver, a fellow Duke professor who took leave to become a special adviser to the White House, helping to hone the "Plan for Victory."

"The problem they're facing is, there's only so much their rhetorical strategy can do to reshape public perceptions of the very real events that are out there," Gelpi said, "and right now those events are very bad when thousands of Iraqis are being killed every month."

Underscoring just how hard the job of putting an optimistic face on the war is proving to be, the staunchest remaining supporters are voicing pessimism about the prospects under the administration's current approach, increasingly calling for Bush to engage in a new and more aggressive strategy.

"Those of us who still back the war are worried and alarmed," said William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard and an early proponent of the invasion. "We need to win the war, and if it's not going well, we need to change strategy."

On the National Review Online Web site last week, David Frum, a former speechwriter for Bush and another longtime supporter of the war, said that if the United States did not change its policy by significantly increasing troop levels, "Baghdad, and therefore central Iraq, will in such a case slide after Basra and the south into the unofficial new Iranian empire." Then, he predicted, "American troops will be free to stay or go, depending on whether we wish to deny or acknowledge defeat."
Frum criticized as insufficient a plan that Bush announced last week for an increase of troops in Baghdad - brought from other parts of Iraq - to help quell the violence in the capital.

In the current political climate, there is little appetite among voters for an increased troop presence. In the latest New York Times poll, 56 percent of those who responded said the United States should set a timetable for withdrawal; 33 percent said it should do so even if it meant handing Iraq over to insurgents.

Dan Bartlett, the White House counselor, said Bush's hands would not be tied in Iraq by domestic politics.

"You want to have as many people as supportive of this effort as possible," he said in an interview. "But at the end of the day, the commander in chief is going to make the decisions, and at the end of the day he's going to defer to commanders on the ground, not the swings of public opinion."