Bush's Optimism On Iraq Debated

"We are just paying a heavy price for mistakes made before," said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

"It's dangerous when U.S. officials start to believe their own propaganda," said David L. Phillips, a former State Department consultant who worked on Iraq planning but quit in frustration in 2003 and has written a book called "Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco." "I have no doubt that they genuinely think that Iraq is a smashing success and a milestone in their forward freedom strategy. But if you ask Iraqis, they have a different opinion."

Phillips added that U.S. officials keep pointing to landmarks such as the January elections as turning points but "at no point have any of these milestones proven to be breakthroughs."

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari last week lobbied Cheney and others for a more assertive U.S. military approach in Iraq, as well as for more help meeting the fall deadline for writing and approving a constitution. But even that carries risks. "Heavy-handed meddling by the Bush administration only undermines Iraq's new political leaders," Phillips said.

Peter Khalil, a former national security policy adviser for the Coalition Provisional Authority that ruled Iraq after Hussein's fall, said the rosy views expressed by Bush and Cheney reflect tentative hopes for progress down the road rather than a focus on day-to-day events at the moment. "They're thinking more long term when they make such optimistic remarks," said Khalil, now a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. "There's some cause for optimism; however, things could turn badly very quickly."

Major Sunni leaders recently agreed to abandon their boycott of the political process; if they can be brought into the drafting of a new constitution and subsequent elections, Khalil and others say, it would undercut the elements of the insurgency that are powered by disaffection among the once-ruling Sunni minority. To do that, Khalil said, the new Shiite-led Iraqi government has to find the right balance in terms of including former members of Hussein's Sunni-dominated Baath Party.

"If you address these issues, it's very, very difficult to see them continue on in the use of violence because they become part of that [governing] structure," Khalil said.

A Western diplomat in Baghdad said victory would have to be won in a drawn-out struggle that will have peaks and valleys. "We should not expect some big-bang breakthrough so that one day the insurgency ends," he said on the condition of anonymity. "We should expect a long grind-it-out." After all, he said, "this is the hardest thing we've done to try to rebuild a state almost from zero."

"If you pull back far enough," he added, "you see a positive trend. . . . The negative is we've had some really spectacular car bombs, really gruesome car bombs and we've had a terrible civilian death toll. . . . The overall trend lines for the last six to seven months are better, but not so much better that we can say it's over or we won."

McCain said Bush needs to carefully balance his reassuring statements to a troubled nation with frank talk about the arduous and unpredictable future. "It's a long, hard struggle and very gradually maybe we are making progress," McCain said. "There are tough times ahead."