Friday, September 17, 2004
Campaign rival Sen. John F. Kerry says Bush tries to hide the truth from Americans.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
WASHINGTON -- 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 Eastern nation.
A growing sense of unease is especially visible among Republicans as well as Democrats in Congress as the drumbeat of bombings, kidnappings and steadily rising death toll reverberates through the region.
The new challenge to the administration's view of events comes at a crucial time for President Bush, as the interim Iraqi government in Baghdad struggles to prepare for elections in January and as Iraq dominates his campaign for re-election.
Positive message
Campaigning Thursday in Minnesota and upstate New York, Bush acknowledged "ongoing acts of violence" in Iraq, but quickly returned to a central -- and positive -- campaign 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 towards elections," he said in St. Cloud, Minn.
But to shore up that message, Iraq's interim prime minister, Iyad Allawi, is scheduled to make a high profile visit to Washington next week that includes an address to a joint session of Congress on Thursday.
Hiding the truth?
Amid the new disquiet over the administration's Iraq policy, Democratic presidential contender John F. Kerry pointedly charged during a campaign speech to the National Guard Association in Las Vegas on Thursday that Bush was trying to hide the truth in Iraq 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," Kerry 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 blistering response from Vice President Dick Cheney a few hours later during a campaign rally in Reno, in which Cheney declared he was "stunned by the audacity of that statement."
He repeated an accusation that the Democratic challenger voted to deny combat troops "the support they needed once they were at war" -- a comment that referred to Kerry's vote against an $87 billion supplemental funding bill to fund the deployment of U.S. forces to Iraq.
Growing frustration
Against this backdrop, senior congressional aides sketched Thursday a growing mood of uncertainty and frustration after hearings a day earlier by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in which prominent senators from across the political spectrum voiced dismay at 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 improving security, conservative Republican Chuck Hagel of Nebraska concluded: "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 Saddam fell, a euphoric Iraqi population would swiftly embrace democracy.
"The nonsense of that is [now] apparent," Lugar 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." So far, slightly more than $1 billion of the $18.4 billion authorized by Congress last November for rebuilding Iraq has been spent.
Although Lugar has criticized the administration frequently in the past for its slow pace of spending, a close aide said the context has 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," explained Lugar's spokesman, Andrew Fisher.
Democrats concerns
On Thursday, high-profile Democrats voiced their own concerns, apparently spurred by the pessimistic forecast in a classified intelligence report prepared for the president in July. Called the National Intelligence Estimate, the report represents 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 NIE, prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency, 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."
Added Democratic West Virginia Sen. John "Jay" Rockefeller IV: "The fact is, we are losing ground."
A U.S. government official who has reviewed the NIE said it is about 70 pages long and summarized its contents as "things are bad, things could get worse."
But the official said the assessment also indicates there are some "underpinnings" for success and stressed that the outcome hinges on the ability of U.S. and Iraqi authorities to improve security in the country. The official declined to elaborate on the conclusions in the document, but noted that the intelligence agencies indicated it is difficult to project developments in the chaotic country.
Pessimistic reports
That report follows other pessimistic assessments made public in recent days by respected independent think tanks. Britain's prestigious Royal Institute of International Affairs concluded earlier this month that Iraq would be lucky if it managed to avoid an internal break-up and civil war and that the chaos there could spark broader upheaval elsewhere in the Middle East region.
Many U.S. experts following Iraq from positions in nongovernmental think tanks say they have also adjusted their expectations downward, though not necessarily as far as 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."
Threat to elections
Adding further to the pessimism, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan cast doubts this week about the viability of holding national elections next 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 British Broadcasting Corp. The United Nations is an important player in preparing the elections, supervising voter registration and training those who will operate polling stations.
Bush administration officials have made the issue of holding the elections as scheduled an important measure of success. Last weekend, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice insisted that violence would not delay them.