Unease Shadows Bush’s Optimism

A combination of escalating bloodshed, gloomy assessments and deteriorating security conditions in Iraq are challenging the Bush administration’s upbeat view of the struggle to establish democracy in the beleaguered Middle East nation.

A growing sense of unease is visible among Republicans as well as Democrats in Congress as bombings and kidnappings continue to rise along with the death toll.

The new challenge to the administration’s view of events comes at a crucial time for President Bush, as the interim Iraqi government struggles to prepare for elections in January and as the Iraq issue dominates his bid for reelection.

Campaigning Thursday in Minnesota and upstate New York, Bush acknowledged “ongoing acts of violence,” but quickly returned to a central -- and positive -- message on Iraq: that U.S. policies are succeeding and Iraq is on the verge of democracy and free elections.

“It wasn’t all that long ago that Saddam Hussein was in power with his torture chambers and mass graves, and today this country is headed toward elections,” he said in St. Cloud.

To shore up that message, Iraq’s interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, will visit Washington next week and will address a joint session of Congress.

Amid the new disquiet over the administration’s Iraq policy, Democratic presidential contender Sen. John F. Kerry charged during a campaign speech Thursday to the National Guard Assn. in Las Vegas that Bush was trying to hide the truth from the American people.

“Two days ago, the president stood right where I’m standing and did not even acknowledge that more than 1,000 men and women have lost their lives in Iraq,” he said. “He did not tell you that with each passing day, we’re seeing more chaos, more violence, more indiscriminate killings.”

Kerry’s remarks drew a sharp response from Vice President Dick Cheney a few hours later at a campaign rally in Reno, where Cheney said he was “stunned by the audacity of that statement.”

He repeated an accusation that Kerry voted to deny combat troops “the support they needed once they were at war” -- referring to the senator’s vote against an $87-billion supplemental bill to fund the deployment of U.S. forces to Iraq.

Against this backdrop, senior congressional aides Thursday sketched a growing mood of uncertainty and frustration after hearings a day earlier by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at which prominent senators from across the political spectrum voiced dismay over the course of events.

Noting the administration’s request to divert $3.4 billion in Iraq reconstruction money to a series of emergency measures, including efforts to improve security, conservative Rep. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) said: “Now, that does not add up, in my opinion, to a pretty picture, to a picture that shows that we’re winning. But it does add up to this: an acknowledgment that we are in deep trouble.”

The committee’s moderate Republican chairman, Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, expressed exasperation at the administration’s rosy prewar assessments that as soon as Hussein was deposed, a euphoric Iraqi population would embrace democracy.

“The nonsense of that is [now] apparent,” he said. “The lack of planning is apparent.”

But Lugar’s central criticism was leveled at the administration’s seeming inability to accelerate the disbursement of reconstruction aid, calling the process “extraordinarily ineffective.” About $1 billion of the $18.4 billion authorized in November by Congress has been spent.

Though Lugar has frequently criticized the administration for the slow pace, an aide said the context had shifted.

“Each time he says it, we’re further down the line in a situation where more people are killed, people still don’t have jobs and the whole scenario is getting worse,” spokesman Andrew Fisher said.

High-profile Democrats voiced their own concerns Thursday, apparently spurred by the pessimistic forecast in a classified intelligence report prepared for Bush in July.

The National Intelligence Estimate is the latest in a series of gloomy assessments about Iraq’s future.

Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) accused Bush of presenting “a rosy scenario as to how well Iraq was going.”

“This report throws a large bucket of cold water over those roses,” Graham told reporters, adding that the document, prepared by the CIA, should cause Bush “to stop making these reckless and misleading statements and start spending some time figuring out how we’re going to deal with the problems in Iraq and the war on terror.”

A U.S. official who has reviewed the NIE summarized its contents as “things are bad, things could get worse.”

But the official said the assessment also indicates that there are “underpinnings” for success and emphasized that the outcome was hinged on the ability of U.S. and Iraqi authorities to improve security.

The NIE follows other pessimistic assessments made public recently by respected independent think tanks. Britain’s prestigious Royal Institute of International Affairs concluded that Iraq would be lucky to avoid an internal breakup and civil war and that the chaos could spark upheaval elsewhere in the Middle East.

Many U.S. experts following Iraq for nongovernmental think tanks say they have adjusted their expectations downward, though not necessarily to the level of the British scenario.

“I’ve lowered my own expectations, but [U.S. officials] haven’t yet,” said Michael O’Hanlon, an Iraq specialist at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “Initially, there was every reason to think that if Saddam was knocked off, the old regime would go and even if democracy was imperfect, people would support it. Now the broad message is that it’s going to be very hard to make Iraq stable, much less democratic.”

Adding to the pessimism, United Nations Secretary- General Kofi Annan late Wednesday cast doubt on the viability of holding Iraqi elections in January if the current level of violence continues.

“You cannot have credible elections if the security conditions continue as they are now,” he said in an interview with the BBC. The U.N. plays a key role in preparing the elections, supervising voter registration and training polling station workers.

Administration officials have made the issue of holding the elections on schedule an important measure of success. Last weekend, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice said violence would not delay them.

In campaign speeches, Bush regularly refers with optimism to the elections. “Iraq now has a strong prime minister, a national council, and national elections are scheduled in January,” he said Tuesday in Colorado. “Our country is safer because we made tough decisions.”

A day earlier, in Michigan, Bush praised Allawi. “They got a tough prime minister. I like him -- Allawi. He’s a strong guy,” he told a crowd in Muskegon.

“He wants there to be elections. He knows that Iraq can handle democracy. It’s what he believes in his soul. I believe we ought to help him get there.”

In West Virginia last weekend, Bush expressed confidence in the face of the insurgency’s escalation. “We will continue our work to advance freedom in the broader Middle East and around the world, and we will prevail,” he said. “Our strategy is succeeding.”

Kerry said Bush was “living in a fantasy world of spin,” disregarding his own intelligence reports and misleading Americans about the need to go to war and about current conditions in Iraq.

“The hard truth is that our president has made serious mistakes in taking us to war with Iraq,” he said, adding that Bush “was wrong to rush to war” without adequate numbers of troops and equipment and with insufficient planning and diplomacy.

“And perhaps worst of all, the mess in Iraq has set us back, way back, in the war on terror. The simple fact is, when it comes to the war on terror, George W. Bush has taken his eye off the ball.”

Cheney, among those who pressed hardest for the war and who also offered optimistic assessments of how U.S. troops would be greeted by Iraqis freed from dictatorship, has devoted much of his standard campaign speech to Iraq, predicting success. But Thursday he also urged Americans to take a longer view of Iraq’s problems and the U.S. response.

“These are not easy tasks. They are very difficult tasks,” he said. “People have no prior experience with democracy.

“I’d remind you how long it took us. From the time we wrote our Declaration of Independence until we had a constitution in place and a democratically elected government that we could live with was 13 years, 1776 to 1789. So we shouldn’t be surprised if there are bumps along the way. There will be.”

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Times staff writers Greg Miller in Washington, James Gerstenzang in Albuquerque, Maggie Farley in New York, Maura Reynolds in St. Cloud and Maria L. La Ganga in Las Vegas contributed to this report.