WASHINGTON: The unexpected resurgence of controversy over the war in Iraq is creating new political risks not only for President Bush, but also for his principal Democratic challengers.

At a time when Bush is grappling with a sluggish economy, questions about the pre-war intelligence and the post-war reconstruction plan in Iraq could threaten the foundations of the president’s political strength: his reputation for honesty and the perception that he is effectively managing national security.

“I’ve done focus groups in three cities this past week, and I think this is already adding up to something quite big,” said Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg. “There is an erosion of trust. And whereas before, people were almost unwavering in support of the direction he was taking the country in fighting terrorism, now I think people are unsure about the direction he is taking on terrorism.”

Yet even while dangerous for Bush, the continued spotlight on Iraq is producing headaches for the leading Democratic contenders who supported the war. All find themselves under intensified fire from former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, the war’s most vocal foe among the major Democratic candidates.

And as Dean tries to ride the resurfacing skepticism about the war among Democratic activists, some party strategists worry that by redoubling his criticism of the conflict, he risks further alienating swing voters who could decide the general election.

Indeed, Republican strategists believe Dean is driving all of the Democratic contenders toward an overheated criticism of Bush that could sound to swing voters like weakness on the Iraq war itself.

“The Democrats are inviting a debate that they cannot win,” said Ed Gillespie, the incoming chairman of the Republican National Committee.

For the pro-war Democrats, the paradox is that the same developments on Iraq that are strengthening their case against Bush are also strengthening Dean against them.

“The good news here is that the more Bush’s standing on foreign affairs is diminished, the better he looks to beat in 2004,” said a senior aide to one of the pro-war Democratic contenders. “But the blow-back from that is it diminishes the candidates who voted for the war also.”

Most analysts believe the war has emerged as such an incendiary topic because so many distinct controversies are converging. The immediate spark has been the dispute over Bush’s argument in January’s State of the Union address that the British government had learned Iraq had attempted to obtain in Africa uranium that could be used for nuclear weapons. That is a claim the administration now has said it cannot substantiate and should not have included in the speech.

But strategists in both parties agree the uranium issue has burned with such intensity because it has become a proxy for the larger question of America’s inability to find conclusive evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. That was the principal justification Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair offered for war.

Adding to the anxiety over that failure has been the rising death toll of US soldiers from persistent guerrilla resistance in Iraq.

Amid these difficulties, two recent polls have shown that the percentage of Americans who believe the war was worth fighting has declined to just over 55 per cent. And the percentage of Americans who believe that before the war the administration exaggerated the evidence on Iraq’s weapons programmes hit 50 per cent in a recent ABC/Washington Post poll.

Taken together, the pre-war and post-war controversies arguably have produced the most serious questioning of the administration’s credibility since it took office and the most forceful challenge to Bush’s foreign policy since the terrorist attacks of Sept 11, 2001.

The White House has constructed its defence in two layers: the narrow and the broad.

On the narrow level, the White House has said that the uranium allegation was never central to the president’s case for war. It has also argued that, although the American government has been unable to substantiate the claim, it yet might prove correct. Blair continues to stand by the allegation. And officials have said that even if it proves untrue, Bush was relying on the US intelligence community’s consensus judgment.

With increasing gusto, the Democratic presidential candidates have attacked Bush on both fronts.

They have been pressing him, for instance, to provide a larger role in the reconstruction for the United Nations and NATO. For the Democrats who backed the war — Senators John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and John Edwards of North Carolina and Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri — that argument was an update of their contention before the conflict that Bush was too unilateralist in foreign policy and needed to work harder to bring allies into the cause.

More complex for the pro-war Democrats has been their calls for investigations into whether Bush manipulated the pre-war intelligence information. The controversy has provided them an opening to question Bush’s credibility more forcefully than before. Kerry, for instance, has launched a series of speeches that accuse Bush of misleading the country not only on national security issues, but on domestic concerns as well.

But even as the pro-war Democrats wield the intelligence dispute against Bush, Dean has used it to accuse them of failing to confront the administration before the war.

Many Democratic leaders worry that Dean’s renewed insistence that the war itself was wrong could prove disastrous in a general election.—Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Los Angeles Times.