Mixed reaction to Bush Iraq comments

WASHINGTON -- Military analysts said yesterday that President Bush's signal that US troops may remain in Iraq beyond his presidency reflected the reality on the ground: A long, hard fight against a still-robust insurgency.

But Democrats, seizing on the growing unpopularity of the war, vowed to use Bush's comments to make the case that the president has lost control of a war he initiated.

''The rhetoric indicated that it would last maybe six months. They were so optimistic about everything instead of being realistic about anything," said Representative John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat who voted for the war but now wants to pull out.

But if Bush does not push for a quicker withdrawal, ''there are going to be a lot of Republican seats in danger," Murtha said.

The war, which the White House marketed early on as a liberation Iraqis would welcome, and which would be speedily resolved and paid for with Iraq's oil revenues, is exhausting the patience of the American public -- a majority of whom, polls have suggested, now believe the war was a mistake. The Bush administration has been assuring the American people that US troops would come home as Iraqi forces showed they could take control of their own country.

Asked about it at a news conference this week, however, Bush indicated that US troops may be in Iraq into 2009, saying the decision of when to completely pull out would be a matter for ''future presidents" and for future Iraq governments.

The White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, sought to tone down the president's comments yesterday, saying Bush did not mean there would be large numbers of troops in Iraq when his term ends in January 2009.

''The question was: 'Will there be zero?' " troops, McClellan told reporters on Air Force One en route to Wheeling, W.Va., where Bush delivered another in a series of recent speeches meant to shore up support for his approach to battling terrorism. ''So he was referring to that specific question."

Republicans argue that congressional races tend to be decided on local issues, and many of them say they are confident that the party can hold its House and Senate majorities.

Those majorities have handed Bush numerous legislative victories during his five years in office. But while national security is rarely a defining issue in congressional elections, the specter of mounting casualties in a long, drawn-out war may indeed hurt down-ticket Republicans this November, said Ross Baker, a congressional specialist and a political science professor at Rutgers University.

''This is something that will definitely affect the midterms. There is clearly an increasing sense of frustration, a feeling that these people we're trying to save are unworthy of our sacrifice and that it wasn't a good decision [to go to war] to begin with," Baker said.

Dan Ronayne, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said, however, that Democrats risk voter backlash if they try to go after the president on the issue of national security, which is generally the GOP's strong suit.

''What I think is going to be troubling for voters," Ronayne said, ''is when they see Democrats going after this as an election issue rather than as a national security issue," Ronayne said.

''The president has always said this is a long-term struggle akin to the Cold War," said Whit Ayres, a GOP consultant. But he added that Iraq would be a ''major issue" in the fall elections. ''So much is going to depend on whether Iraq is more stable and less violent by November," Ayres said.

Military and foreign affairs specialists said Bush was realistic in suggesting US forces would be in Iraq after his presidency was finished -- but they warned that the GOP might pay a political price for it.

''Most Americans sort of anticipated that fighting Al Qaeda was going to be a long" battle and that the fighting in Iraq would not be, said Russell Howard, a former brigadier general who now heads the antiterrorism center at Tuft University's Fletcher School of Diplomacy.

But he said he feared the Bush administration and the White House would prematurely draw down troop levels to appease an impatient electorate.

''There will be a correlation between the number of troops in Iraq and the next congressional election," Howard said. ''Unfortunately, the number of troops in Iraq may not reflect the military requirements."

Steven Simon, a Middle Eastern specialist with the Council on Foreign Relations, said that sitting presidents historically tend not to completely withdraw troops they installed in a foreign country and that Bush was not likely to be an exception. ''It's very difficult for administrations that undertook a commitment of this kind to be the one to disengage from it, because there's so much invested in it," Simon said.

Howard and others contended that the US casualty rate has decreased recently, while Iraqi police and troop deaths have soared. As tragic as those casualties are, Howard said, it is a sign that more Iraqis are fighting for their own country, instead of leaving the task to US and coalition forces.

But the American public's tolerance for US casualties is rooted in several other factors -- including whether there is a shared perception among political and opinion leaders that the stakes are high in the conflict and whether people believe there are good prospects for success in a meaningful time frame.

Those premises are falling apart, Simon said, with the reports of faulty intelligence, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, and the longstanding questions about when and how the United States can declare a victory.

Bush also may be assuming the next president will have a smaller number of troops in postconflict Iraq, military analysts note.

Bush's public comment Tuesday that he would not be the commander in chief to fully withdraw forces from Iraq will further frustrate an anxious electorate, said Andrew Bacevich, a retired army colonel and international relations professor at Boston University.

''Whether he intended to or not, that struck me as really tacit acknowledgment that he was no longer in control of events in Iraq," Bacevich said. ''We've got a president whose [political] capital is being poured into a war he himself acknowledges he can't win on his watch."