A firm position, shadowed by skepticism

By Peter S. Canellos, Globe Staff, 9/24/2003

WASHINGTON -- President Bush stood firmly behind his Iraq policy yesterday, but the political landscape in the United Nations, the Congress, and perhaps even Main Street America seemed to be shifting around him.

For the first time since Sept. 11, 2001, Bush seemed to be in a crisis that was purely political, and largely of his own making.

His address to the United Nations, replete with his usual good-and-evil rhetoric justifying the war on terrorism and the usual condemnations of Saddam Hussein, offered few notes of conciliation and no new approach that seemed likely to win the support of skeptical allies. That seemed to indicate that Bush's monthlong effort to craft a new UN resolution was floundering, and that the United States will continue to bear the military and financial burdens of rebuilding Iraq.

If so, it could not come at a worse time for the president, with opposition to him and his $87 billion request for military operations and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan starting to grow.

Yesterday, the Gallup Poll announced that Bush's approval ratings had sunk to their lowest point in his presidency, 50 percent, while the Pew Research Center released a poll suggesting that 59 percent of Americans oppose the $87 billion request. More worrisome for the president, 57 percent in the Pew survey said they were willing to freeze Bush's tax cuts rather than sacrifice any domestic programs to foot the Iraq bill.

"This is a very unsettled time for opinion about Bush and opinion about Iraq," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center. "It looks like they're the same thing, and that may not be good news for Bush in the end."

For most of the summer, public support for the war remained high, despite ongoing casualties, the failure to locate weapons of mass destruction, and reports that the administration had exaggerated some intelligence data to build the case for the war. But when Bush addressed the nation two weeks ago, explaining that Iraq was now the "central front" in the war on terrorism and that $87 billion would be needed in the next year to continue the job, public support started to waver.

"The public's skepticism about what's happening in Iraq was building very gradually and very diffusely," said Ralph Whitehead Jr., professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. "Without realizing it, Bush's proposal for the $87 billion probably crystalized public opinion on Iraq."

Just how strongly the public is turning on the Iraq war is unclear. The Gallup Poll suggested that the nation was almost evenly divided on whether it was worth going to war at all, with 50 percent saying yes and 48 percent saying no. That's a drop of 8 percentage points in two weeks. The Pew poll suggested that the public was more concerned about spending money to rebuild the country than maintaining a military presence, with 63 percent opposing any removal of troops.

But by finally putting a price tag on the cost of the war, the administration seems to have invited voters to compare it with other priorities, like prescription-drug benefits. Indeed, every pet cause -- from housing to deficit reduction -- can be seen as being crowded out by Iraqi concerns.

The administration had hoped to leaven its Iraq funding request with increased contributions from other countries. For a while, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell expressed optimism about a new UN resolution that would help allies justify sending their troops and money. The United States even endorsed the idea of putting the troops under a UN flag, as long as the commander was American. Negotiations, however, hit a snag over the question of how quickly the Americans would surrender control of the country.

Diplomats and politicians looked to yesterday's speech for signs of a break in the impasse. They didn't see any.

"I was a little surprised," said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank associated with the moderate Democratic Leadership Council. "Why go up to the General Assembly if you don't have a clear plan for how to mend fences and manage differences among key allies?"

Marshall, whose organization has supported Bush's Iraq policy at other turns, declared that Bush "missed a chance to be conciliatory, to be more reassuring, to help cure the breach."

Still, Marshall said, he expects congressional Democrats eventually to support Bush's funding requests because the United States cannot allow Iraq to descend into chaos. But they'll force him to justify every penny.