NYT: White House Hones a Strategy for Post-Zarqawi Era
The meeting was as much a media event as it was a high-level strategy session, devised to send a message that this is “an important break point for the Iraqi people and for our mission in Iraq from the standpoint of the American people,” in the words of the White House counselor, Dan Bartlett.
It came as Republicans began a new effort to use last week’s events to turn the war to their political advantage after months of anxiety, and to sharpen attacks against Democrats. On Monday night, the president’s top political strategist, Karl Rove, told supporters in New Hampshire that if the Democrats had their way, Iraq would fall to terrorists and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi would not have been killed.
“When it gets tough, and when it gets difficult, they fall back on that party’s old pattern of cutting and running,” Mr. Rove said at a state Republican Party gathering in Manchester.
Speaking with reporters at the end of the first day of a two-day war summit meeting, Mr. Bush began to shift responsibility for Iraq’s future to its new government. “Success in Iraq will depend upon the capacity of the new government to provide for its people — we recognize that,” said Mr. Bush, who was flanked by Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and several other cabinet secretaries. The message to the Iraqi government, he said, “is that we stand with you.”
Mr. Bush did not address the question of when American troops might begin to come home. But he emphasized efforts to build loyalty to the government of the new prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, something he said could be done in part by creating a fund to help Iraqis share in Iraq’s oil revenues.
The proposal represented a new twist on the administration’s optimistic prewar projections, which suggested that oil revenues might foot the bill for Iraqi reconstruction.
On Capitol Hill, leading Republicans in the House were preparing for a week of legislative maneuvers meant to portray them as better equipped to fight terrorism and Democrats as blanching in the face of a tough enemy.
Leaders in the House and the Senate have scheduled several debates and votes intended to shore up public support for the war, culminating Thursday with a House vote on a resolution declaring Iraq a central part of “the global war on terror” and criticizing any move to set “an arbitrary date” for the withdrawal of American forces. In a statement, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House majority leader, said the debate and vote would show Americans that “there are clear differences between Republicans and Democrats on how best to confront the global war on terror.”
The resolution and debate seemed intended to force Democrats to take a stand on setting a date for the withdrawal of American troops, a divisive issue. Taken together, the steps underscored how Republicans are pouncing on the first positive developments in months in Iraq to reverse a steep slide in support for the war.
The decline in public approval for the war — and a corresponding drop for the president — has emerged as the single biggest cloud over the Republicans’ prospects for elections this year.
Democrats countered Monday that the Republicans were playing partisan politics with the war. “Apparently, the American people will still have to wait for a serious debate on Iraq that is aimed at correcting bad policies instead of bad poll numbers,” said Representative Rahm Emanuel, an Illinois Democrat.
Democrats were planning to capitalize on displeasure with the war this week with their own maneuvers, like as a proposed amendment by Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts setting a timetable for the withdrawal of most American combat troops from Iraq this year.
Mr. Kerry scoffed at Republican charges that withdrawals were a strategy of “cut and run,” which he described as a “simplistic knee-jerk expression used to avoid the realities of war in Iraq.”
Even so, Democrats are far from united, and party leaders were consulting across the caucus to seek a consensus position.
“Everyone supports responsible redeployment,” said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the minority leader. “Everyone supports resolving sectarian differences and revitalizing reconstruction efforts. The question is, given the intractable nature of this war, how do we proceed from here?”
In his address on Monday night, Mr. Rove highlighted what Republicans see as Democratic vulnerabilities in calling for a troop withdrawal, specifically skewering Mr. Kerry and Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, a retired Marine colonel who fought in Vietnam and has become a leading war critic and proponent of redeployment.
“If Murtha had his way, American troops would have been gone by the end of April, and we wouldn’t have gotten Zarqawi,” Mr. Rove said.
Both sides agree that the politics of Iraq are far from clear. A CBS News opinion poll conducted over the weekend and released Monday suggested that the killing of Mr. Zarqawi had done little to change public perceptions about the war in Iraq, or about Mr. Bush.
Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, said that the latest Republican moves could help galvanize core voters who may be conflicted about the war now, but that the effort “all falls away if sectarian violence continues and Iraq continues to be ground down in a war that has no sign of success.”
Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, said in an interview, “The public is going to have a wait-and-see approach.”
Administration officials have acknowledged that they have learned from the past, and they were careful again on Monday not to overplay the significance of the killing of Mr. Zarqawi at the risk of having it followed by a new round of mayhem.
Reporters were ushered into the president’s meeting to hear a brief fragment of his conversation with the American ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad. At one point, Mr. Bush said that the killing of Mr. Zarqawi was “not going to end the war.”
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