Whether you agree with his reasons or not, Blair can articulate the policy that got us into Iraq and make it sound both noble and realistic. He’s getting hammered at home for leading Britain into the war, but the U.S. Congress gave him a hero’s welcome.
Blair is a lifeline for President Bush right now. Bush is looking to Blair to refocus the debate away from questions about dubious intelligence and back to the danger Saddam Hussein posed. Blair delivered an impassioned defense of the war saying “history will forgive” if no weapons of mass destruction are found but that a threat ignored would never be forgiven in the post-9-11 world where there is a nexus between rogue states and terrorists. “This isn’t fantasy,” he said. “This is 21st-century reality, and it confronts us now.”
The political firestorm engulfing Blair and now Bush is not about yellowcake and Niger. It’s about a press and a public having second thoughts about a war allegedly fought to disarm Iraq that has uncovered no WMDS, and that is taking on the look of a quagmire. The discredited assertion about the Iraqis seeking uranium from Africa is emblematic of the salesmanship used to build political support and take the country into a war of choice. The case for urgency to avert an imminent nuclear attack was never there though Bush and other top officials invoked the imagery of a mushroom cloud.
Bush’s stature is diminished. His lawyerly defense of the Niger statement, that it was a mistake to include but it’s technically correct, chipped away at the moral clarity that is the basis of his popularity. Independent pollster John Zogby shared preliminary numbers with me Thursday evening that show the toll that the souring situation in Iraq combined with the weakened economy is taking on Bush. His re-elect number is 46 percent yes, 48 percent no. His personal favorable rating is 56.5 percent, unfavorable 42 percent. “That’s what’s buttressing him; that’s the only thing he has going for him,” says Zogby. Voters like and trust Bush for now, but how long will their patience last?
Bush’s job performance in the Zogby poll is 53 percent with 47 percent negative. Zogby cautions that these numbers are preliminary, but he expects the trend to hold. “He’s falling like a rock,” he says. Pitted against a Democrat, Bush comes in at 47.5 percent; the Democrat at 43 percent. The right track/wrong track numbers, always a key indicator, are also problematic for Bush with 49 percent saying the country is on the right track and 46 percent saying it isn’t.
The new commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. John Abizaid, concedes that American soldiers are embroiled in a guerilla war with yearlong deployments and no end in sight, harkening back to Vietnam. Critics inside and outside the administration warned of the difficulty of imposing democracy in Iraq, but Bush plunged in anyway. Neocon advocates of military action said it was “immoral” to keep U.S. troops hunkered down in Kuwait for an extended period of time while United Nations inspectors did their job. How much more moral is it to keep them in Iraq where they get shot in the head in the markets of Baghdad?
Whoever wrote the 16 offending words in Bush’s State of the Union speech, the responsibility belongs to Bush alone. He gave the speech. CIA Director George Tenet tried to take the blame, but he told the Senate Intelligence Committee in closed session that a top official in the White House insisted on the Niger insertion. The way Washington works, it won’t be long before that person is identified. Speculation is that the trail leads to Vice President Dick Cheney and his chief of staff, Scooter Libby, a prominent hawk in the administration’s aviary, or a top official of the National Security Council. It was Cheney who regularly visited the CIA and demanded data to support his conclusions. Intelligence analysts concerned that information was being politicized to bolster an unproved connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda filed a complaint with the agency’s inspector general.
Cheney was seated behind Blair in the House chamber on Thursday evening. It was the first public sighting of the vice president in some time other than fund-raisers and a trip to the hospital to get his pacemaker batteries checked. The rumor among Republicans on Capitol Hill is that Cheney, knowing he is vulnerable, is bringing back Mary Matalin to handle damage control. Matalin left the White House earlier this summer thinking her boss was in fine shape. Now he could be caught up in Bush’s summer of discontent.
Events on the ground in Iraq will create the context for the presidential election. Bush is trying to muster international support. Even the loyal British are down to only 14,000 troops in Iraq, a fraction of what’s needed. Some 10 countries have offered modest help; another 60 turned down Bush, refusing assistance without a clear U.N. mandate. Word from the battlefield is not optimistic. “I think we’re in trouble,” says a former ambassador to the region. “What I hear from my military contacts is that this is going to break our Army.”
Bush never had the stomach for this kind of deployment, but the fate of his presidency and his re-election rests on nation-building and peacekeeping, policies he campaigned against. Not even Tony Blair’s ringing oratory can quell the gathering storm.
