Back Home, Challenges Abroad

While in Africa, President Bush dealt with the grim issues of AIDS, civil war and poverty, but his trip across the troubled continent last week may look like a peaceful interlude compared with what now awaits him in Washington.

Bush returns to intensifying questions about the cost and duration of the American presence in Iraq, where U.S. authorities are taking precautions against widely rumored plans for attacks this week pegged to two former national holidays.

He will also need to put in time to shore up the new “road map” for an Arab-Israeli peace and a 2-week-old truce declared by major Palestinian militant groups. Israel does not want to hand over control of more territory until the Palestinian Authority moves against extremist groups, while the Palestinians are angry about Israel’s failure to release significant numbers of prisoners.

And after delaying for a week, the president must finally determine what steps, if any, the U.S. military should take to help halt civil war in Liberia.

Next, Bush may need to focus on the Korean peninsula. A report Saturday from a former South Korean official said North Korea has reprocessed all 8,000 spent fuel rods at its Yongbyon nuclear complex. If confirmed, it would mean the North has made more progress toward stockpiling material for making atomic weapons. U.S. intelligence has also reportedly found traces of krypton-85, a byproduct of reprocessing spent fuel rods, in air samples from the Yongbyon facility.

Even following through on pledges he made in Africa to promote democracy and deal with the AIDS pandemic may be difficult for the president, with Congress last week agreeing to appropriate only a fraction of the funds Bush promised.

“He’s got a lot of projects started, but now he has to follow through,” said Ellen Laipson, former vice chairwoman of the National Intelligence Council and now president of the Henry L. Stimson Center, a Washington think tank.

The accumulating challenges seem all the more daunting now that the Democrats have shed their reluctance to criticize Bush on security issues, putting his administration seriously on the defensive for the first time since he took office.

In particular, the White House is facing considerable heat over Bush’s allegation in this year’s State of the Union address that Baghdad had sought to buy uranium in Africa. The administration now concedes that claim was erroneous.

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bob Graham of Florida charged Sunday that the Bush administration had manipulated intelligence on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction to fit its policy goals. “I think there was a selective use of intelligence -- that is, that information which was consistent with the administration’s policy was given front-row seats. Those questions that were not supportive were either put in the closet or were certainly in the back rows,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Repercussions from the flap over intelligence are already spilling over into how the entire U.S. intervention in Iraq is perceived.

“Even if Bush hopes to put the intelligence story to bed, the Democrats are now quite seized with the idea of not giving him an open-ended mandate on Iraq,” Laipson said. “People are reaching a threshold and realizing that there is a cost for open-ended engagement in Iraq. Congress is signaling that the administration should articulate a plan to wrap it up there and reduce troops.”

On Sunday, the U.S. began transferring political power to Iraqis with the naming of a 25-member governing council to help the civilian administrator run postwar Iraq. But the hand- over seems to underscore U.S. vulnerability rather than strength, as Washington faces increasingly emphatic demands by Iraqis for greater control of their own country.

The U.S. decision last week to scale back its presence in the town of Fallouja, site of a series of attacks since U.S. troops killed about 20 protesters in April, is a microcosm of that problem. The move followed a protest march on the mayor’s office Thursday by dozens of police, wearing uniforms provided by the U.S., who threatened to quit unless U.S. troops stop using their station as a base.

The Bush administration was “unprepared conceptually in terms of understanding Iraqi anger, because the war was so easy that it was hard to believe that the [ruling] Baath Party would try to reconstitute itself,” said Henri J. Barkey, a former State Department policy planning staffer who is now chairman of the international relations department at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. “But loyalties to the party, from people who were paid by it or benefited from it, were deeper than we thought.”

The mounting pressures forced Pentagon officials to admit to Congress last week that the cost of keeping troops in Iraq and running the country has reached almost $4 billion a month, double original estimates, and that the deployment could last more than twice as long as the original projection of two years.

Iraq is slowly but surely shifting from a sought-after victory to an unwanted burden, a situation Bush must turn around quickly to prevent lasting damage to his foreign policy goals or himself politically, analysts add.

“This is the beginning of foreign policy fatigue in the country, with the administration admitting for the first time that we may be in Iraq for four years, and that will surely have an impact on Bush,” Barkey said.

Although legislators have urged the Pentagon to seek help from NATO to relieve the burden on U.S. troops in Iraq, that option may be fading due to divisions among the 19 member states over whether the trans- atlantic alliance should intervene -- because of deployments elsewhere and ongoing disagreements about the war.

Bush may also have to work to keep the Mideast peace plan advancing as it faces new controversies and obstacles.

“The road map is now something to be worried about,” said a senior State Department official who requested anonymity. “Tensions are such that we’re now only one suicide bomb away from collapse and only one failed prisoner release away from collapse.”

Potentially sparking further tension, the Israeli government said over the weekend that Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat may be deported if he continues to undermine the new government of Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas.

“Arafat should be removed from any position of influence,” Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told “Fox News Sunday.” “The problem now [is] that Arafat still controls most of those armed Palestinian forces and the security organization, or one can say security/terrorist organizations.”

U.S. officials are particularly concerned that Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, has been unable to strengthen his fragile position since he was selected April 30, after months of U.S. pressure for new leadership. The Bush administration decided last week to expedite $20 million of an existing allocation and channel it to Abbas for reconstruction projects and to generate jobs for a population suffering 70% unemployment.

“Abu Mazen is a de jure leader, and we’re trying to help make him the popularly accepted leader,” the State Department official said. Arafat still has the largest backing of any leader, more than 20%, while Abbas has less than 2%, according to recent polls. Expelling Arafat could only further undermine or discredit Abbas, U.S. officials warn.

The most pressing decision awaiting Bush, however, may be what to do about Liberia. After repeatedly pledging that the United States will participate in United Nations and West African efforts to convert a cease-fire into a political transition to end 14 years of conflict, the president must soon resolve the question of deploying troops -- and determine the scope and duration of their mission.

“August may not be such a quiet month,” Barkey said, “given all the issues that are coming up.”