Criticism of War Seen as Risk for Democrats

The unexpected resurgence of controversy over the war in Iraq is creating new political risks not only for President Bush but also for his principal Democratic challengers.

At a time when Bush already is grappling with a sluggish economy, questions about both the prewar intelligence and the postwar reconstruction plan in Iraq could threaten the foundations of the president’s political strength: his reputation for honesty and the perception that he is effectively managing national security.

“I’ve done focus groups in three cities this past week, and I think this is already adding up to something quite big,” said Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg. “There is an erosion of trust. And whereas before people were almost unwavering in support of the direction he was taking the country in fighting terrorism, now I think people are unsure about the direction he is taking on terrorism.”

Yet even while creating danger for Bush, the continued spotlight on Iraq is producing headaches for the leading Democratic contenders who supported the war. All find themselves under intensified fire from former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, the war’s most vocal foe among the major Democratic candidates.

And as Dean tries to ride the resurfacing skepticism about the war among Democratic activists, some party strategists worry that by redoubling his criticism of the conflict, he risks further alienating swing voters who could decide the general election.

Indeed, Republican strategists believe that Dean is driving all of the Democratic contenders toward an overheated criticism of Bush that could sound to swing voters like backpedaling on the Iraq war itself.

“The Democrats are inviting a debate that they cannot win,” said Ed Gillespie, the incoming chairman of the Republican National Committee.

For the pro-war Democrats, the paradox is that the same developments on Iraq that are strengthening their case against Bush also are strengthening Dean against them.

“The good news here is that the more Bush’s standing on foreign affairs is diminished, the better he looks to beat in 2004,” said a senior aide to one of the pro-war Democratic contenders. “But the blow-back from that is it diminishes the candidates who voted for the war also.”

Most analysts believe that the war has emerged as such an incendiary topic because so many distinct controversies are converging. The immediate spark has been the dispute over Bush’s argument in January’s State of the Union address that the British government had learned Iraq had attempted to obtain uranium in Africa that could be used for nuclear weapons. That is a claim the administration now said it cannot substantiate and should not have included in the speech.

But strategists in both parties agree the uranium issue has burned with such intensity because it has become a symbol for the larger question of America’s inability to find conclusive evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. That was the principal justification Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair offered for war.

Adding to the anxiety over that failure has been the rising death toll of U.S. soldiers from guerrilla resistance in Iraq.

Amid these difficulties, two recent polls have shown that the percentage of Americans who believe the war was worth fighting, although still a majority, has declined to just more than 55%. And the percentage of Americans who believe that before the war the administration exaggerated the evidence on Iraq’s weapons programs hit 50% in a recent ABC/Washington Post poll.

Taken together, the prewar and postwar controversies arguably have produced the most serious questioning of the administration’s credibility since it took office, and the most forceful challenge to Bush’s foreign policy since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The White House has constructed its defense in two layers: the narrow and the broad.

On the narrow level, the White House has said the uranium allegation was never central to the president’s case for war. It also has argued that, although the American government has been unable to substantiate the claim, it may yet prove correct. Blair continues to stand by the allegation. And administration officials have said that even if it proves untrue, Bush was relying on the U.S. intelligence community’s consensus judgment in making the claim and did not intend to mislead the public.

On these details, the administration has sometimes stumbled. Bush last week, for instance, said doubts about the allegation surfaced subsequent to his State of the Union address. But administration sources have said CIA Director George J. Tenet intervened to remove similar language from a Bush speech in October and the agency tried to warn the British away from the claim through the fall.

Bush has been more sure-footed in articulating the broader line of defense, which aims to shift the debate from the rationale for the war to its result.

That strategy was vividly on display Thursday when Bush, at a joint news conference with Blair in Washington, was asked whether he took personal responsibility for including the uranium allegation in his speech.

“I take responsibility for making the decision, the tough decision, to put together a coalition to remove [Iraqi President] Saddam Hussein,” Bush said. “Because the intelligence ... made a clear and compelling case that Saddam Hussein was a threat to security and peace.... I take responsibility for dealing with that threat.”

But Greenberg and other Democratic strategists contend that even voters who believe Bush was right to launch the war are growing increasingly concerned about both the handling of prewar intelligence about the threat posed by Iraq and the planning for the postwar period.

With increasing gusto, the Democratic presidential candidates have attacked Bush on both fronts.

They have been pressing him, for instance, to provide a larger role in the reconstruction for the United Nations and NATO. For the Democratic candidates who backed the war -- Sens. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and John Edwards of North Carolina, and Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri -- that argument was an update of their contention before the conflict that Bush was too unilateralist in foreign policy and needed to work harder to bring allies into the cause.

More complex for the pro-war Democrats has been their calls for investigations into whether Bush manipulated the prewar intelligence information. The controversy has provided them an opening to question Bush’s credibility more forcefully than before. Kerry, for instance, has launched a series of speeches that accuse Bush of misleading the country not only on national security issues, but also on domestic concerns.

But even as the pro-war Democrats wield the intelligence dispute against Bush, Dean has used it to accuse them of failing to confront the administration before the war.

“Why are members of Congress running for president asking the tough questions today that they failed to ask before the war?” Dean declared last week.

He also has said the questions about the prewar intelligence and the continuing postwar violence have made it “more and more clear ... what a mistake this administration made in launching a preemptive war in Iraq.”

Many Democratic leaders worry that Dean’s renewed insistence that the war was wrong could prove disastrous in a general election.

“There are a lot of Americans who are going to take umbrage with the argument that all those lives were lost in vain and it was in some manner a hoax,” said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank.

But strategists for Dean’s rivals acknowledge that with his denunciations, he may gain new ground among liberal-leaning Democrats in the primaries. Indeed, virtually no one in the party imagined that some three months after Baghdad fell, the leading Democratic candidate most eager to talk about his position on the war would be the one who opposed it most.