September 9, 2003	Tuesday	Rajab 11, 1424

WASHINGTON, Sept 8: When President George W. Bush outlined his Iraq strategy before his nation on Sunday night, he was not doing so to report a major victory. It was an extraordinary reversal of political fortune that compelled the US president to publicly acknowledge that all was not well in Iraq.

Mr. Bush’s national address came at a time when the opposition Democratic Party is becoming increasingly confident of taking away voters from the president. Some political pundits are even predicting that the White House may have a new occupant next year: a Democrat.

It was a complete reversal from a few months ago when even the opposition was bracing itself for a second Bush term. Mr. Bush’s ratings in the opinion polls, sky-high after the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, have fallen gradually since the Iraq war. The fall became rapid as US casualties in Iraq mounted.

2004 ‘REFERENDUM’: All signs indicate that the 2004 election — little more than a year away — will turn into a referendum on America’s role in Iraq, a country whose citizens seem increasingly unwilling to accept US forces as their liberators.

Aware that the liberation theory does not have too many takers even in America, President Bush on Sunday night appealed directly to Americans’ self-interest.

“The surest way to avoid attacks on our own people is to engage the enemy where he lives and plans,” he declared, equating the Iraqi guerrillas with those who struck the United States on 9-11.

“We are fighting that enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan today, so that we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities.”

He, however, did not answer the question many Americans are asking: when will US troops leave Iraq?

Instead of giving a timetable for the withdrawal of troops, he promised: “There will be no going back to the era before Sept 11, 2001.” This confirms what political pundits had long predicted that 9-11 would be a key element in Mr Bush’s election strategy for 2004.

The pundits say that despite Mr Bush’s attempt to draw voters’ attention away from his difficulties in Iraq, it is going to be the key issue in the 2004 election.

They point out that this will be the first wartime election since 1972, when US forces were still fighting in Vietnam.

The American voters, they say, will now be asking themselves who can bring the US troops back from Iraq at minimum damage to US prestige and power: Mr Bush or a Democrat like Joe Lieberman or Howard Dean, the two key opposition candidates for the next presidential election.

In a statement issued immediately after Mr Bush spoke on Sunday night, Mr. Dean suggested that rather than making Americans safer, Mr. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq may have made them less safe.

“How are we actually safer for having gone to war?” he asked. “We were told that Saddam Hussein had an incipient nuclear weapons capability and large stocks of chemical and biological weapons. Where are they? Have terrorists gotten their hands on them because we failed to secure them, or were they never there? Before the war there was no evidence of any link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Now Al Qaeda sympathizers and organizers are streaming to Iraq in ever greater numbers, feeding off of the resentment of the Iraqis and targeting our servicemen and women.”

The Democrats are already trying to convince the voters that NATO countries and nations such as Morocco would be willing to send their troops to Iraq if only a president other than Mr Bush would ask them.

But the pundits say that Mr Bush still has an advantage over the Democrats: he can control the timing of events, such as strikes on terrorist bases or announcements of the capture of key terrorist leaders.

But they also say that Mr Bush may not always be the master of events — sometimes he’ll be at their mercy. Any major negative development in Iraq or Afghanistan, the pundits say, can cause Mr. Bush’s ratings to drop even more rapidly.