Administration officials believe much of the public is still eager for victory and open to persuasion if the president can make the case that he has made progress. They took heart in a survey last week by RT Strategies, a bipartisan polling firm, that found that 49 percent of Americans favor bringing troops home when only "specific goals and objectives" are met, 30 percent want a fixed timetable for pulling out and 16 percent support immediate withdrawal. The middle 30 percent, they figure, is the real political battleground.
Thomas Riehle, a Democrat who runs RT along with Republican V. Lance Tarrance Jr., said many Americans are suspicious of war critics as well as the war. "What is shifting is the sense that the military and White House do not have a good plan to proceed to victory or troop withdrawal," Riehle said in an e-mail. At the same time, he said, the Democrats "don't seem to be in a position to drive opinion . . . where Bush is vulnerable."
Amid such skepticism, Bush has retreated to mainly military settings to defend his policy. Yesterday's speech at the U.S. Naval Academy was his fourth before a military audience in three weeks.
But in subtle ways, he and the administration are adjusting the message to reflect Iraq realities.
No longer are they declaring that the insurgency is in its "last throes," as Cheney did last spring. Instead, they emphasize in their new strategy document that "it is not realistic to expect a fully functioning democracy, able to defeat its enemies" to be built in three years. And Bush acknowledged yesterday what U.S. military and intelligence experts have said for months, that terrorists make up the smallest group opposing coalition forces and that "ordinary Iraqis, mostly Sunni Arabs" represent "by far the largest group."
W. Patrick Lang, a former Defense Intelligence Agency expert on Iraqi affairs, said that Bush's language "changes the frame of reference," because the president acknowledged "for the first time this is essentially an Iraqi insurrection." Lang said Bush's previous emphasis on the foreign makeup of the insurgency "made it impossible for U.S. forces to deal with the enemy because we needed to defeat them totally." Now, Lang suggested, U.S. military officers have room to try to work out deals with Iraqi opposition fighters.
Staff writers Robin Wright and Walter Pincus contributed to this report.
