WASHINGTON: It has come slowly. After months of silent acquiescence to President George W. Bush’s push towards a military conflict with Iraq, Democrats are finally showing signs of an appetite for war. But it is a war against the Bush administration for taking Democratic support for granted.

Last week as some of the biggest voices in the Democratic Party condemned attempts by the Bush administration to turn the planned war into a political issue in the November mid-term elections, some were complaining that the Democratic leadership had still not gone far enough.

Among them was Congressman Nick Rahall, a Democrat who enthusiastically supported the first Gulf war with Iraq, but strongly opposes a new one. He is one of those who does not believe the strong comments from his party’s leadership would be translated into action: putting the brakes on the Congressional resolution being sought by Bush to unleash the US military machine against Saddam Hussein.

Mainstream Democratic wisdom, he explains, holds that for Democrats to win the mid-term congressional elections in November, they must give a popular President what he wants. Then, they argue, Iraq will cease to be an issue, allowing the Democrats to start scoring points on domestic matters such as the economy.

“As far as my party saying: ‘Let’s get it out of the way,’ sure, I’d like to get back to issues that are just as important as national security — job security at home, economic security, access to prescription drugs, health security, Enron and Halliburton,” says the West Virginia congressman, whose grandparents were immigrants from Lebanon.

“But I feel there are questions that need to be answered — over Iraq — before we run headlong into trying to wipe an issue off the political map, when it means putting American men and women in harm’s way.”

His comments are part of a startling change of mood on Capitol Hill. Two weeks ago Bush staffers were confident they would have no problem securing a resolution approving action against Iraq.

Now those efforts have become ‘bogged down’ in Congress, following a week of accusations from senior Democrats that the President is turning the issue of support for a war into a political issue to garner electoral support for November and distract attention from domestic issues, particularly the economy.

Democrats are still angry over accusations by Bush and his closest aides last week that the Democrat-led Senate was not interested in ‘national security’. Amid a raft of depressing economic news, including figures showing poverty rising in the US for the first time since 1990, some Republicans too are wondering whether the President and his team are putting their party in peril by taking their eyes off the domestic agenda to push for war.

With control of the House and Senate at stake, however, both parties are trying to present unified fronts, confidently asserting that theirs is the finger on the true pulse of the electorate. In reality, though, neither is quite sure what will play more strongly with voters: national security or their personal finances.

And it is the Democratic party that finds itself more visibly divided: generally on the issue of war with Iraq, and specifically over the issue of a Congressional resolution that would give Bush authority to loose the American war machine on Saddam Hussein. After months of relative quiet on the issue, Democrats are suddenly getting noisy.

Among the most prominent to break ranks was former Vice President Al Gore, who still harbours presidential ambitions. Despite a withering rebuke to Bush last week over his policy on Iraq, Gore’s speech was received by Democratic legislators with lukewarm enthusiasm.

Instead it was left to the normally low-key Senate majority leader Tom Daschle to deliver the official Democratic riposte to what they claim is Bush’s bullying, giving the cue to other leading Democrats — including Senators Sarbanes, Byrd, Feingold and Ted Kennedy, as well as Representative Richard Gephardt — to speak out against the President as never before, signalling that the limits of post-Sept 11 consensus have finally been reached.

And while many expect the Democrats will still eventually vote on some kind of resolution, the episode seems to have at least enabled them to slow the process down and define it more to their liking.

Most intriguing about the internal Democratic debate is the degree to which each faction in the party believes it understands best the present feelings of the electorate, yet remains unable to quantify fully its position. It is this that is driving the quiet but contentious debate about the party’s leadership in a time of peril.

To conservative Democrats, it has seemed nothing short of a moral and political imperative that Congress should effectively rubber stamp whatever the President puts in front of it. To do otherwise, they argue, would be perceived as unpatriotic.

Finally, there are the Democratic consultants and strategists pushing for a quick resolution as politically expedient. They believe that once an appearance of national unity is established in Congress, the Democrats can largely forget about Iraq and fight the rest of the election campaign on the economy and corporate skullduggery.

On the surface there are no such divisions among Republicans, who appear to be overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the President’s line. Privately, however, a growing number of conservatives are gravely concerned about the White House’s zeal for making war.

Republican leaders such as Dick Armey expressed concern about Iraq earlier this year, but since then such sentiments have been publicly muted.

According to a number of Republican strategists, this belies the reality that many are privately frustrated by the administration’s lack of focus on economic issues and its obsession with a possible war they consider antithetical to conservative principles.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.