The Dallas Morning News

WASHINGTON – The war in Iraq is becoming a battle for the hearts and minds of the people – the American people.

And even supporters say the Bush administration may be losing that contest.

“The public views this every day, Mr. Secretary, more and more like Vietnam,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., warned Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Thursday.

“We will lose this war if we leave too soon,” Graham said. “And what is likely to make us do that? The public going south. And that is happening, and that worries me greatly.”

Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., an outspoken advocate of the war, said Iraq’s insurgents “will only defeat us on the field of American public opinion.”

And at the moment, he said, “I fear American public opinion is tipping away from this effort.”

Convened to give the administration a chance to shore up support for its policy, the Senate hearing followed recent opinion polls showing a sharp erosion in public support for the war. In a Harris Poll, 63 percent said they wanted U.S. troops to come home within a year.

Michael O’Hanlon, a military analyst with the Brookings Institution, said the comments by Graham and Lieberman were clear evidence that the polls have shaken the war’s backers.

“There’s obviously something significant going on here, and they’re worried about it,” O’Hanlon said. “Those two guys are obviously not trying to score political points, because one’s a Republican and one’s a hawkish Democrat who’s been supportive of this effort.”

As part of a campaign to counteract the trend shown in those polls, President Bush is to meet Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari at the White House and hold a joint news conference with him Friday. Bush also is to give a major speech on Iraq next week.

At the Senate hearing, Rumsfeld and three of the nation’s top military commanders declared that despite daily car bombs and casualties, and a U.S. death toll of more than 1,700 service members since the war began in March 2003, reports that the war is going badly are incorrect.

“Any who say we have lost or are losing are flat wrong,” Rumsfeld declared. “We are not.”

He and the generals testified that the interim Iraqi government elected in January is making progress toward writing a constitution and holding elections for a permanent government this year.

Iraqi security forces being trained to take over for U.S. and allied troops are slowly but surely gaining strength, they said.

But they also noted that the events that make the most news are the assassinations and bombings and political disagreements among Iraq’s ethnic and religious factions.

“You sense the American people are tipping away from supporting,” Rumsfeld told Lieberman. “I have a feeling they’re getting pushed, myself.”

The secretary and the generals pleaded for public patience.

Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “We are on the right course, and we must stay that course.”

Army Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, acknowledged the decline in public support but said the facts on the ground were not as bad as news coverage might make them seem.

“I sense that many view the daily snapshots of violence in Iraq in isolation and conclude that our efforts in Iraq are not progressing,” Gen. Casey said.

“That is what the terrorists and the insurgents would like you to believe,” he said. “Quite the contrary, the Iraqi people make progress every day.”

Army Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, said confidence among the troops in the field was high, but they are affected by signs of disillusionment at home.

“When I look back here, at what I see is happening in Washington, within the Beltway, I’ve never seen the lack of confidence greater,” Abizaid said.

“Maybe it’s something we’re not doing right in the field. But I can tell you that when my soldiers say to me, and ask me the question whether or not they’ve got support from the American people or not, that worries me. And they’re starting to do that.”

Some support

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., sympathized and told the generals to take heart.

“I think we all know that the cut-and-run caucus is always alive and well,” Inhofe said. “It doesn’t matter what war it is, what conflict it is, and it certainly is today.”

John Isaacs, president of the disarmament group Council for a Livable World and an opponent of the war, said the polls are turning bad for the administration for the same reason the public turned against the Vietnam War.

“These numbers have been changing steadily and getting worse for the president since the beginning of the year as casualties have mounted and the optimistic pledges of the president and the vice president and secretary of defense prove to be hollow and untrue,” Isaacs said.

He cited Vice President Dick Cheney’s recent assertion that the Iraq insurgency is in its “last throes” – an assessment Cheney defended in a CNN interview Thursday.

Citing progress toward forming a permanent Iraqi government and in training Iraqi security forces, Cheney said he expected that “the months ahead will be difficult months. I think there will be a lot of violence, a lot of bloodshed, because the terrorists will do everything they can to try to disrupt that process.”

But he predicted that “we will, in fact, succeed in getting a democracy established in Iraq. And I think, when we do, that will be the end of the insurgency.”

Ducks question

At the Senate hearing, Abizaid begged off when asked if he disagreed with Cheney. But he testified that the strength of the insurgency was “the same as it was” six months ago and that the number of foreign “jihadists” coming to Iraq to fight had risen.

Isaacs said Cheney’s remarks reminded him of “Vietnam, where we kept hearing from Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara that “we’ve turned a corner,’ or they’d seen “light at the end of the tunnel.”‘

Polls may show ups and downs in support for the Iraq war over coming months, depending on whether the Iraqi government writes a constitution, Isaacs said, but he predicted the trend on American backing for the war would be steadily downward.

“Americans just don’t have the patience for a long war where things are not going well,” he said.

Abizaid told the senators that he and other military leaders are well aware that they need the public’s backing.

“The enemy does not seek to defeat us militarily but to wait us out, to sap our confidence and to break our will,” Abizaid said. “We can’t win the war, American soldiers can’t win the war, without your support and without the support of our people.”

Speaking of the polls, Abizaid told the senators: “We can’t ignore the problem. We need to move together to understand it and fight it together.”

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