Bush's Credibility Takes a Direct Hit From Friendly Fire
WASHINGTON — For months, President Bush has struggled to maintain public support for the war in Iraq in the face of periodic setbacks on the battlefield. Now he faces a second front in the battle for public opinion: charges that the administration is not telling the truth about how the war is going.
Bush and his aides have delivered a positive, if carefully calibrated, message. The war is not yet won, they acknowledge, but steady progress is being made. "We can expect more tough fighting in the weeks and months ahead," the president said in his weekly radio address Saturday. "Yet I am confident in the outcome."
But last month, Vice President Dick Cheney broke from the administration's "message discipline" and declared that the insurgency was in its "last throes." The White House has been paying a price ever since.
Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), who supported the decision to go to war in Iraq, complained that the White House was "completely disconnected from reality." Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), another supporter of the war, charged that Bush had opened not just a credibility gap, but a "credibility chasm."
Even Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld distanced himself from the vice president's words. "I didn't use them, and I might not use them," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week. Rumsfeld said the insurgency could conceivably "go on for four, eight, 10, 12, 15 years, whatever
Historian Robert Dallek, a biographer of President Lyndon B. Johnson and an outspoken critic of Bush, said: "Analogies are imperfect, and I hate to press this one, but this is so much like Vietnam. It has echoes of the Vietnam experience when senators like [Arkansas Democrat J. William] Fulbright began to hammer Johnson on our aims and goals and credibility
"It's a cumulative process. It takes time. We're not at the full-blown stage on this yet. But it's heading in that direction."
Cheney spokesman Steve Schmidt said the vice president thought the controversy was mostly partisan politics. "He understands that it's natural for political opponents to seize on a statement and try to make political hay of it," Schmidt said.
But other administration officials and Republican elders, who spoke anonymously because they feared retribution from the White House, said the vice president had blundered.
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