Bush Presidency Could Be Ultimate Casualty of War

As Iraq descends into chaos, President Bush is facing a political reality that once seemed implausible, one in which setbacks on the defense and foreign policy front are crowding out good economic news at home.

The sights and sounds emanating from Iraq in the last few days have begun to echo those of the Vietnam era, as the body count grows and generals talk of a need to send more U.S. troops to fight an increasingly fierce guerrilla war.

It is too soon to say what consequence this might have in the presidential race. Elections in November are rarely decided by events that take place in April. And the country is so polarized, with Republicans dug in for Bush and Democrats bitterly opposed, that a few days of bad news are not likely to change the calculation much.

But if the death toll mounts and Iraq spins utterly out of control, even Bush supporters concede his reelection prospects could be seriously jeopardized, regardless of how strongly the economy is performing this fall.

“Iraq is the central battlefield in American foreign policy right now,” said William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and one of Washington’s leading voices for war with Iraq.

Bush “has got to win the battle ... for the country’s sake and certainly the Bush administration’s own sake.”

The invasion -- or liberation -- of Iraq was supposed to underscore the post-9/11 resolve that transformed his presidency and sent his approval ratings to unseen heights. Success there was also supposed to offset the dramatic loss of American jobs since Bush took office nearly 3 1/2 years ago.

But current events demonstrate just how volatile this extended general election season has become.

Just a few days ago Bush was touring the country, touting the creation of 300,000 jobs last month as a long-awaited sign that the nation’s hiring drought was finally over.

Democrats had delighted in comparing Bush to Herbert Hoover, the last president to preside over a net loss of jobs during his administration. The bullish March figures took some of the starch out of that attack and also gave Bush a welcome relief from the ghastly scenes broadcast from Fallouja -- but only for a short while.

By Wednesday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was forced to share a split TV screen during a Pentagon briefing with pictures of American soldiers blazing away at insurgent fighters across Iraq and a map with arrows pointing to spots where U.S.-led forces are under siege.

“Some things are going well, and some things obviously are not going well,” Rumsfeld said when asked about the challenge of convincing Americans that the situation is in hand. “There will be good moments, and there will be less good moments.”

Clearly, Wednesday was one of those less good moments.

But analysts see a pattern going back even further, to the capture of Saddam Hussein in December.

“There’s a sense that things have just gotten worse and not gotten better after the expectations that were raised,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, a nonpartisan polling group.

“Since January, there’s just been an ongoing series of stories about how things haven’t settled down.”

A Pew poll released earlier this week showed approval of Bush’s handling of Iraq slipping to a new low, 40%, and his overall job approval dropping to 43%, the worst showing of his presidency. Other polls have picked up similar movement, though surveys show Bush’s Democratic rival, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, picking up little support as a result. The two are essentially tied in most opinion surveys.

Recent events in Iraq have forced an adjustment on Kerry’s part as well.

He hoped to spend the week talking about budget matters as part of his effort to flesh out his record for voters. But even though Kerry delivered what was touted as a major policy speech at Georgetown University on Wednesday, he spent a good deal of time responding to circumstances in Iraq.

He called the situation “one of the greatest failures of diplomacy and failures of judgment that I have seen in all the time that I’ve been in public life.”

“Where are the people with flowers, throwing them in the streets, welcoming the American liberators the way [Vice President] Dick Cheney said they would be?” Kerry, a longtime member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, scoffed in an interview with American Urban Radio Networks.

For all his disdain, however, the subject remains a tricky one for Kerry. He voted in Congress to support the invasion. And it was clear this week he had no alternative plan for pacifying Iraq, beyond a vague notion that other nations should help out.

Asked Wednesday if it was appropriate to attack the administration at a time Americans were coming under increased fire, Kerry seemed briefly taken aback.

“I’m simply repeating what I’ve said many times,” he told reporters in Washington. “ As I’ve said repeatedly, we’re all united in support of our troops.”

The Bush campaign has been quick to accuse the senator of playing politics with Iraq. But it is not only Democrats who are expressing doubts.On his radio program earlier this week, Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly suggested the situation in Iraq was “like South Vietnam redux” and predicted that “if it gets worse, there’s no way [Bush] wins.”

“The American people are not going to absorb this kind of chaos for several years,” said Reilly, who had supported Bush on the war. “I know this country, I know myself. If I’m seeing 10 bodies a weekend over the last weekend in October, that’s going to influence my vote.”

Michael Harrison, publisher of the trade magazine Talkers, predicted other conservative radio hosts would turn against the president, after serving as one of his most loyal constituencies.

Many of them “were out on a limb” in support of the war “because of their respect for the presidency,” Harrison said. “The fact is, it’s a very uncomfortable position to be in, in conflict with the facts.”

Few doubt that Bush, far more than Kerry, will be judged on what happens in Iraq. Indeed, it may be the only issue that matters to voters in November if the economy perks along sufficiently to take job worries off the table.

That makes comparisons to Vietnam, the last war conducted during an election, instructive.

There are important differences. The U.S. involvement in Vietnam spanned well over a decade and more than 58,000 Americans were killed. By contrast, the U.S. invaded Iraq a little over a year ago, and there have been fewer than 700 American soldiers killed so far.

It took years for popular opposition to the Vietnam War to build, spurred in part by a draft that sent many middle-class sons to fight in the jungles of Southeast Asia. The U.S. soldiers in Iraq, by comparison, are part of a volunteer Army. Even so, there was staunch opposition to the war from the start.

Perhaps most significant, the scenes of fighting are far more immediate and graphic on today’s big-screen television sets and all-news channels than they were in the days when news from Vietnam consisted of footage that showed up on the three nightly news shows, usually after heavy editing and a delay of at least 24 hours.

“What you saw was much more abstract,” said Melvin Small, a Wayne State University historian and author of a book on the Vietnam protest movement. “You would never have seen those bodies hanging from the bridge in Fallouja.”

Foreign wars, in and of themselves, rarely decide presidential campaigns. Even in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam conflict, civil rights and “law and order” were at least as important in electing Republican Richard Nixon over Democrat Hubert H. Humphrey. (Both promised a quick end to hostilities, which ended up dragging on four more years.)

Instead, voters tend to weigh a president’s performance as commander-in-chief as part of an overall job assessment.

In the case of an incumbent, “the public makes a judgment about whether they would be well served by staying the course or making a change,” said Kohut of the Pew Center.

“It’s not carefully calculated like, ‘42% of my judgment is economic and 58% is Iraq.’ It’s just a general judgment.”

For the Bush administration, the happy news during an otherwise grim week is that voters are still more than six months away from having to decide.

Times staff researcher Susannah Rosenblatt contributed to this report.