Hill Republicans Desert Bush

It has been a crucial, even pivotal, week on the Iraq war in Washington. As the wave of bombing massacres continues unabated in Baghdad, moderate Republicans like Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina have joined mainstream Democrats like Joe Biden of Delaware in coming out angrily against the current conduct of the Iraq war, and even Iraq theater commander Gen. John Abizaid has admitted that the much-touted operations to try and break the insurgents in Baghdad got nowhere.

In an unprecedented frank and grim assessment to the Senate Armed Services Committee Thursday, Abizaid completely denied the message that has been coming from the administration over the past month and more that deploying an unprecedented number of troops from the new Iraqi security services in counter-insurgency operations in Baghdad was rolling back, even if not breaking the back, of guerrilla operations there.

Instead, Abizaid told Congress, more foreign fighters were coming into Iraq and therefore its "overall strength is about the same" as it was six months ago.

His comments came on a day when four car bombs killed 17 people in Baghdad. In all 43 people were killed in guerrilla attacks on Wednesday and Thursday.

The continuing guerrilla onslaughts around Iraq and in its capital came after a grim weekend when 11 U.S. troops were killed in a three-day period.

Abizaid's testimony was also striking because it was the most open public contradiction by senior army officer of previous claims by the president and top administration officials since then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki was publicly rebuked by then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in the run-up to the war for saying that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to secure the country.



It also came the same day Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld came under withering criticism from skeptical questioners in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Rumsfeld struck his familiar give-no-ground stance of unquestioning optimism: "Any who say we have lost or are losing are flat wrong. We are not," he said.

But even old Rumsfeld admirers like Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, the strongest supporter Rumsfeld and his Department of Defense civilian hawks have had on the Democratic side of the Senate for their Iraq policies, was no longer soothed by such words. "I fear American public opinion is tipping away," he admitted.

And Graham was far more blunt. "I fear we have a chronic problem on our hands," he said.

And even Wednesday's verbal clashes on Capitol Hill, over the past week, senor Republicans on Capitol Hill, especially in the Senate, have been coming out with unprecedented, bold and harsh public criticisms of administration policy on Iraq.

Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska's criticism of the administration's policies in Iraq on network television June 19 came as no surprise from a Vietnam War ground combat vet who has always bucked the GOP official line on Iraq.

Still, Hagel's revelation that he was considering running as a presidential candidate in 2008 for the first time raised the specter for party leaders of a repeat of the events that tore the then-dominant Democratic Party apart with lasting consequences 40 years earlier.

In 1968, another maverick senator, Democrat Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, ran as a single-issue candidate protesting the continued prosecution of the Vietnam war and picked up such a strong surge of support in the New Hampshire primary that he humiliated sitting President Lyndon Baines Johnson and forced Johnson to withdraw from the race.

If Hagel became the focal point for pent-up anger and frustration against the war, he could inflict similar damage on Republican front-runners seeking to succeed President George W. Bush.

Even more ominous for the president, has been the defection of Graham. For unlike Hagel, or even popular Sen. John McCain of Arizona for that matter, Graham is neither an outsider maverick nor a would-be presidential candidate two years from now. On the contrary, he has been a loyal stalwart at the heart of the dominant Republican coalition.

Graham's outspoken defection on the war was also noteworthy when it came because the Republican majority in the Senate was suffering a serious fracture over the battle to confirm John Bolton, the former undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Policy, as the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. On Wednesday, no less than eight Republican senators joined the call for disclosure of intelligence decrypts that Bolton had requested during his years at the State Department.

Even worse, the angry public criticisms from Hagel, Graham and others including Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., on the war came during and after public statements trying to hold the line and reaffirm the administration's confidence in its current policies Wednesday given by Rumsfeld in a Pentagon news conference and by Vice President Dick Cheney in a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer. Jones and Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, joined Democrats last week in introducing a House resolution calling for full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq to begin no later than Oct. 1, 2006.

In the past however much skepticism such public statements and appearances by the president or his two most senior and toughest deputies, Cheney and Rumsfeld, have generated among inveterate critics of the war, they have always succeeded in rallying traditional party loyalists in Congress, or at least, convincing them to hold their tongues and give current policies the benefit of the doubt.

But this time, it was as if Cheney and Rumsfeld were speaking only into an angry wind, or to a demoralized crowd heading out of a stadium regardless of whatever exhortations the once-popular speakers were giving to them.

Any military turn of the tide in Iraq could quickly reverse this erosion. But until that happens, or until the administration adopts very different policies that seem to offer a better hope of clearing up the mess, the president's dramatic erosion of support on Capitol Hill looks likely to continue.

Copyright 2005 by United Press International.

All rights reserved.