Collateral Damage
As his ratings slip, Bush finds his future increasingly linked with Iraq's. Will he prevail, or become the prisoner of his own war?

In the 19th century, the military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz said that war is politics by other means. Today, it is almost impossible to tell where war stops and politics begins. As casualties in Iraq continue to mount—782 Americans have died there in the past 15 months—and the twisted images from the Abu Ghraib prison are posted and reposted on websites by the U.S.'s critics around the globe, a growing number of voters are having second thoughts about George W. Bush's instinctive brand of leadership.

For the first time since Bush became President in 2000, more Americans disapprove than approve of his handling of his job, according to a new TIME/CNN poll. The drop in overall support is mirrored by sliding grades from voters for his handling of the economy, foreign policy and the war in Iraq. In the past, a majority of those polled said the U.S. was right to go to war in Iraq; 53% thought so in April. This time, the figure slipped to 48%, with 46% saying the war was wrong. Those shifts have lifted Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, the presumed Democratic nominee, who now leads Bush by five points in matchups among likely voters, even when third-party candidate Ralph Nader is added to the mix.

The 43rd President is heading into the danger zone of American politics: not since Harry Truman has a President won a second term with approval ratings below 50% this close to the November elections. Bush is back in a realm his family knows too well; the last man to visit this haunting place in an election year was Bush's father, who fell to 39% in April 1992 and never recovered. And so, in the stomachs of all those Washington Republicans who have toiled faithfully for both father and son, the spooky déjà vu is back.

A man often dismissed as somehow immature or at the very least a late bloomer, Bush grew up quickly in the debris of 9/11, found his footing and reassured people that he knew what he was doing. His black-and-white, good-and-evil outlook suited the moment. And his overpowering aura of certainty was a sturdy rope and harness to a country that felt as if it had fallen off a cliff.

All that feels like an eon or two ago, and not all the slippage can be traced to the war. Bush has been treading on thin ice for months as his agenda at home has atrophied and a handful of refugees from his team have written well-sourced but derogatory books. Many of the great symbolic gestures he proposed in 2000 to appeal to moderate voters—his promise to "change the tone" in Washington, his credo that he would be a "uniter, not a divider" and his clever "compassionate conservative" badge—disappeared long ago or had little impact. Even when given a choice, Bush has governed mostly from the right, disappointing some suburban independents who took a chance on him.

But it is overseas that Bush has staked his presidency, generated the most praise at home—and launched the most misgivings. The traits that served him well in Afghanistan—speed, secrecy and a revolutionary approach to modern warfare—have the potential to be his undoing in Iraq. Voters glimpsed an image of Bush in the second half of his term that at times was at odds with that of the first half: his obsession with terrorism tends to obscure his perception of facts on the ground; he can be slow to learn from his mistakes; and if he knows where he is going, he rarely explains how he plans to get there.

The President, in any case, has cast his lot dramatically and, it appears, irrevocably. Rather than continue an imperfect but effective policy—begun by his father and continued by Bill Clinton—of containing Iraqis with sanctions, a no-fly zone and the occasional clocker to the head, Bush decided that containment wasn't working anymore. Then came the lightning 21-day war on Iraq last spring that quickly gave way to an occupation that has often seemed wrong from the start: too little planning, too few troops, too much wishful thinking.

Public support for the war was close to the tipping point when images surfaced of U.S. troops giving highly unconventional readings of the Geneva Conventions at Abu Ghraib. In an instant, a handful of Army troopers and their military-intelligence minders had put at risk one of the last remaining justifications for invasion in the first place: to help the Iraqi people. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction—which Bush had cited as a prime reason for launching a pre-emptive strike against Iraq—intensified public doubts.

Faced with challenges before, Bush has met them with his characteristic mix of action and resolve, and he has been following a similar pattern. When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld came under the heaviest fire from lawmakers (and from many in the Bush Administration) for mishandling the prison fiasco, Bush paid a rare visit to the morning meeting of his senior White House staff members and told them to button up. "If I hear any speculation coming out of the White House about the Secretary," he said, "you'll answer to me." Soon after that, Bush marched over to the Pentagon and publicly wrapped his arms tightly around his war boss. "You are doing a superb job," he told Rumsfeld. "You are a strong Secretary of Defense, and our nation owes you a debt of gratitude."

It was flawless damage control, and the White House was helped, perversely, by the ghastly death of Nicholas Berg, an American entrepreneur working in Iraq who was beheaded on-camera by a man the cia believes to be Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi. Berg's death reset the moral-equivalence meter and reminded the world who the enemy is. U.S. officials said privately they could not believe the terrorists had such a poor grasp of public relations. Between the prison scandal and Berg's death, it was easy to imagine that the war for Iraq's hearts and minds can't be won; it can only be lost.

Meanwhile, lawmakers who felt blindsided by the prison abuses are beginning to feel misled as well. Knowledgeable government sources told TIME that House Intelligence Committee Democrats asked the Pentagon last January about an internal Army report on dangerous conditions and poor management at the Abu Ghraib prison. The sources said Pentagon aides told the panel that no such report existed—though it had been finished for months. A Pentagon spokesman had no immediate response.

Bush's test is to explain to the country what comes next. U.S. forces will be rotating in and out of Iraq for years, and their numbers are expected to stay at current levels through 2005. Bush has resisted calls to move up Iraqi elections from next year; his advisers concede that the road will be bumpy.

Administration officials are comforted by the centermost core value in the Bush White House: that 9/11 changed everything. The President's ratings may be slipping, but we live in a terrorist age, and 2004 may be the first election in decades in which polling patterns in May end up predicting nothing about November. "Am I worried?" asked a senior Bush official. "Of course. But we always said this was gonna be close."

—from TIME, May 24, 2004

Questions

1. Why have Bush's approval ratings slipped? Cite at least three reasons.

2. How did Bush react to criticisms of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld following the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib?