Dan Rather IN THE midst of a bad week in Iraq, Congress approved President Bush's request for US$87 billion in additional funding for Iraq and Afghanistan. It's a big political victory for the president, and one he needed to get. But election day provided a reminder, if any were needed, that a far bigger political test on Iraq lies less than a year away.
The Democratic presidential candidates have set their sights on President Bush's Iraq policy, and, with the economy showing strong signs of improving, one can expect it to become a favoured target. If the president is to successfully fend off the Democrats' challenges, and if history is to be a guide, he might need to go beyond this often-repeated vow to "stay the course" and further elaborate his thinking on Iraq.
TRUST AND COMMUNICATION
A bedrock truth about democracies is that they require that there be a high degree of communicable trust between the leaders and the led. Sounds good in theory, and it also translates into practice at election time. On Iraq, the best way for President Bush to maintain that trust might be for him to focus on the 'communicable' part of that formula. Because one question your reporter hears increasingly from various quarters about the president's 'stay the course' language is: Just what is the course?
It seems that most Americans have a sense of what the United States is trying to accomplish in Iraq. But it is a picture that the public has largely had to piece together for itself, out of reports of rebuilt schools and statistics about electrical power. If President Bush was to spell out, in very specific terms, exactly what the United States wants to rebuild and reconstruct, and just what political and economic institutions it seeks to put in place in Iraq, he might go a long way toward blunting his opponents' strongest criticisms. Such a deed might also provide some of the 'metrics' that Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, in his leaked memo, laments are missing for measuring progress in post-war Iraq.
Implicit in putting Iraq goals in concrete terms is the idea that at some point these goals will have been achieved and the troops can come home. In other words, an exit strategy the calls for which, in editorials, op-eds and political circles, have been growing since the approval of the US$87 billion. If the president and his administration want to quiet the whispers of 'quagmire', they could do few things more effective than showing America precisely why Iraq will not be one. Conversely, as long as the U.S. military commitment remains open-ended and subject to varying time estimates depending on who is speaking, the 'quagmire' charge has a chance to find traction with the electorate.
WHAT IS THE SACRIFICE FOR?
Finally, as more soldiers die or come home missing limbs, President Bush will have to find a way to articulate to their families and to America at large just what their sacrifice was for. You could hear the president grappling with that language this week, as he spoke of how the recently killed had "died for... a noble cause, which is the security of the United States. A free and secure Iraq is in our national-security interests." But in an election year and with almost every day bringing the pain of a lost loved one to another American family, the president might have to dig deeper for the specifics residing within these generalities to make a country at war feel better about what it is doing, the price it is paying, and the prospect that there will be a time when the sacrificing will be done.
Dan Rather is a television news anchor. Copyright 2003 DJR Inc.
