WASHINGTON — President Bush's increasing reliance on the United Nations in Iraq is unsettling some of his political allies, but blunting Sen. John F. Kerry's main argument against the administration's strategy for restoring stability there.
In the last week, Bush has scrambled the American debate over the occupation of Iraq by declaring that he will defer to U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi on the selection of the Iraqi government that will assume power after June 30.
Bush had long resisted a major role for the U.N. in Iraq. His new move has blurred the contrast between him and the Massachusetts senator, who has insisted for months that the United States would not attract more military and financial support in Iraq unless it ceded the international community more control over development of the new Iraqi government.
Kerry and his advisors insist that Bush still has not done enough to share authority in Iraq, but some Democrats acknowledge that his shift may make it tougher for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee to distinguish his approach from the administration's.
"There are still ways you can emphasize the difference, but it is harder," said Ivo Daalder, a National Security Council aide under President Clinton.
For Bush, the cost of his maneuver is restiveness on the right. An undercurrent of concern among conservatives about Brahimi's broadening role surfaced Tuesday with a Wall Street Journal editorial denouncing the change.
"Everybody is uneasy," said Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative foreign policy think tank. "It may well be that this is the best of bad alternatives, but it is certainly the case that this is an awful big policy shift and people have serious doubts about whether it will succeed."
Yet many Republican strategists consider such anxiety among conservatives a reasonable price for complicating Kerry's case against the administration on one of the campaign's most volatile issues.
With his move toward Kerry's position, Bush has demonstrated how quickly an incumbent can change the terms of debate in a presidential election by co-opting his opponent's positions. In effect, Bush has thrown Kerry off balance by letting go of the rope in their tug of war over Iraq -- just as Clinton did in 1996, when he signed a revised welfare reform bill after Bob Dole, his Republican opponent, had condemned him for vetoing earlier versions.
