Financial Times Editorial comment: Republicans fear defeat over Iraq

Republicans fear defeat over Iraq
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Published: May 11 2007 20:28 | Last updated: May 11 2007 20:28

Talking to Fox News, the conservative broadcaster, on his visit to Baghdad on Thursday, Dick Cheney said: “We didn’t get elected to worry just about the fate of the Republican party. Our mission is to do everything we can to prevail ... against one of the most evil opponents we’ve ever faced.”

Back in Washington Mr Cheney’s Republican colleagues are showing growing irritation with the vice-president’s Iraq war logic. On Tuesday 11 moderate Republican lawmakers warned George W. Bush that their support for his Iraq “surge” was rapidly running out. Tom Davis, a congressman from northern Virginia, told the US president that in one portion of his House district just 5 per cent supported his Iraq strategy.

The same growing unease applies with even greater force to Republicans in the Senate, who hold 21 of the 33 Senate seats that will be contested in next year’s congressional elections. Many Democrats believe that they could improve their narrow 51-49 Senate majority next year to a filibuster-proof 60 seats or more.

Such is the Democratic party’s confidence that some Democrats are talking of bringing about the same kind of splits in the Republican party that so damaged their own party’s electoral fortunes following the Vietnam war a generation ago. “There are a lot of people on the Republican side who are not happy with the situation,” said Trent Lott, a normally hardline Republican Senate leader.

As a result Republican lawmakers are now wondering aloud about the contents of the Iraq war “Plan B” that Pentagon officials and US generals have hinted will be provided in September should the troop “surge” fail to achieve its purpose. More than 300 US soldiers have died since Mr Bush unveiled the “new way forward” in January.

“The assumption has always been that Mr Bush was planning to bequeath the Iraq war to his successor and that the Republicans in Congress would go along with him,” says Charlie Cook, a leading political analyst. “But that looks increasingly difficult by the day. We could be facing a Nixon in 1975 situation where senior Republicans ultimately prevail on George Bush to change course.”

This week a Newsweek poll put Mr Bush’s approval rating at a new low of 28 per cent, making him the most unpopular US president since Jimmy Carter registered similar scores during the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979. Almost two-thirds of those polled said his actions in Iraq showed he was “stubborn and unwilling to admit mistakes”.

An even stronger measure of Mr Bush’s declining sway within his own party came on Thursday night when he addressed his party’s official convention at a gala fund-raising evening in Washington. “Our mission is to keep the White House in 2008 and retake the Senate and the House,” he said.

Mr Bush managed to raise $10.5m for his party at the event compared to $17m last year and $38.5m the year before. For the first time in many years both the Democratic presidential field and the Democratic congressional leadership are out-fundraising their Republican opponents by about 50 per cent.

In the next 10 days Mr Bush will have another opportunity to demonstrate his immunity to the US public’s backlash against the Iraq war, when Congress sends him its second version of the Iraq and Afghanistan war funding bill he vetoed in its first incarnation last month.

This time the Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill has removed the US troop withdrawal deadlines that prompted Mr Bush’s original veto. But the bill is still likely to contain provisions Mr Bush finds offensive. The Democrats, who have maintained unity in spite of grassroots pressure to cut off all funding for the war, believe their moderation will win more Republican waverers to their side.

“This is the most important American political debate since the 1968 to 1973 Vietnam period,” says Richard Holbrooke, a senior foreign policy adviser to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and potential future secretary of state. “For the first time in America’s history, the next president will come to office inheriting two ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – that is the situation we are in.”

Meanwhile, Mr Bush is searching for someone credible to fill the new post of Iraq war “tsar” in the White House. Up to six US generals have reportedly rebuffed the White House’s overtures.

“You’d have to be very patriotic to take on a job like that at a time like this,” says Mr Cook.