Text 2478, 178 rader
Skriven 2006-08-31 14:27:00 av ROSS SAUER (1:123/140)
Ärende: Strawmen
================
The "Bush Team" has to have their strawmen, don't you know.
Especially since everything they've tried is a total failure. 

Bush Team Casts Foes as Defeatist
Blunt Rhetoric Signals a New Thrust

By Peter Baker and Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writers

Thursday, August 31, 2006; A01

President Bush and his surrogates are launching a new campaign intended 
to rebuild support for the war in Iraq by accusing the opposition of 
aiming to appease terrorists and cut off funding for troops on the 
battlefield, charges that many Democrats say distort their stated 
positions.

With an appearance before the American Legion in Salt Lake City today, 
Bush will begin a series of speeches over 20 days centered on the fifth 
anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But he and his top 
lieutenants have foreshadowed in recent days the thrust of the effort to 
put Democrats on the defensive with rhetoric that has further inflamed 
an already emotional debate.

Bush suggested last week that Democrats are promising voters to block 
additional money for continuing the war. Vice President Cheney this week 
said critics "claim retreat from Iraq would satisfy the appetite of the 
terrorists and get them to leave us alone." And Defense Secretary Donald 
H. Rumsfeld, citing passivity toward Nazi Germany before World War II, 
said that "many have still not learned history's lessons" and "believe 
that somehow vicious extremists can be appeased."

Pressed to support these allegations, the White House yesterday could 
cite no major Democrat who has proposed cutting off funds or suggested 
that withdrawing from Iraq would persuade terrorists to leave Americans 
alone. But White House and Republican officials said those are logical 
interpretations of the most common Democratic position favoring a 
timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq.

"A lot of the people who say we need to withdraw from Iraq say we'll be 
safer, and I don't think that's accurate," said Republican National 
Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman, a key architect of the party's strategy 
heading into the fall congressional campaign. Mehlman noted that al-
Qaeda leaders and other Islamic radicals have said they want to drive 
Americans out of Iraq and use it as a base. "We ought to not ignore when 
they say they're going to do that."

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said it is reasonable for Bush to 
presume that Democrats will try to cut off funding for the war if they 
take over Congress, noting that 54 House Democrats voted against a 
spending bill for military operations last year. "How would they force 
the president to withdraw troops?" she asked. "Yell?"

Democrats contended that the statements went too far. "Maybe there are 
some people in America who do not want to fight the war on terror, but I 
do not know them," Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), chairman of the 
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said yesterday. "We Democrats 
want to fight a very strong war on terror. No one has talked about 
appeasement."

The White House strategy of equating Democratic dissent with defeatism 
worked during the 2002 and 2004 elections, but it could prove more 
difficult this time. Some Republicans, such as Rep. Christopher Shays 
(Conn.), line up with Democrats in seeking a timetable for a withdrawal 
from Iraq. When Bush and his allies accuse those favoring such a 
timetable of "self-defeating pessimism," as Cheney put it this week, 
they risk spraying friendly fire on some of their own candidates.

In an interview yesterday, Shays said the charges by Cheney and Rumsfeld 
are "over the top" and unhelpful. "The president should be trying to 
bring the country together and not trying to divide us," he said. Shays, 
a longtime supporter of the war who just returned from his 14th trip to 
Iraq and faces a tough reelection battle, said he plans to outline next 
month a deadline for replacing U.S. troops doing police-style patrols 
with Iraqi forces. But he fears the Bush administration might not be 
supportive.

Other GOP incumbents, such as Reps. Gil Gutknecht (Minn.) and Michael G. 
Fitzpatrick (Pa.), are also raising serious concerns about Bush's Iraq 
policy.

But many embattled Republicans remain reluctant to break with the 
administration's current approach. Rep. Rob Simmons, another Connecticut 
Republican facing a difficult campaign in a Democratic-leaning district, 
said he will oppose any effort by Shays to establish a pullout deadline. 
"I don't think that is a good idea," Simmons said.

Instead, Simmons highlights his military service and initial objections 
to invading Iraq three years ago. "I am a Connecticut Republican, and 
the environment in which I operate is quite different from elsewhere in 
the country," Simmons said. As for the emerging Bush political strategy 
on terrorism and the war, it "is hard to judge whether it helps or 
hurts," he said. "It may help candidates elsewhere in the country more 
than it helps me."

While no Democrat has the powerful platform that the White House affords 
Bush and Cheney, the complaints about the mischaracterizing of positions 
on the war flow in both directions. Many Democrats accuse the president 
of advocating "stay the course" in Iraq, but the White House rejects the 
phrase and regularly emphasizes that it is adapting tactics to changing 
circumstances, such as moving more U.S. troops into Baghdad recently 
after a previous security strategy appeared to fail.

"Strategically, we are staying committed to the fact that this is an 
important mission and one that should be accomplished," said a senior 
administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. 
Democrats, this adviser said, say "we're 'doing the same thing over and 
over' when that's not the case."

The intensity of the exchanges underscores the power of the issue. 
Although memories of Hurricane Katrina and disputes over the 
reconstruction of the Gulf Coast generated heated debate in recent days, 
strategists in both parties believe that the coming congressional 
elections will turn in large part on the Iraq war and whether voters 
believe it is part of the global battle against terrorism or a 
distraction from it. Bush advisers hope that the legacy of Sept. 11 will 
rally the public back to the unpopular president and his party, while 
Democrats are trying to tap into broad discontent with the Iraq war.

Republicans plan to load the congressional agenda with national security 
issues, including votes on spending for the military, terrorism-fighting 
measures and symbolic bills supporting U.S. troops. Democrats plan to 
force votes on providing more equipment to U.S. troops, implementing the 
recommendations of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission and condemning 
Bush's Iraq policy.

Bush's speech to the American Legion this morning will launch his third 
intensive campaign in the past year to address public anxiety over the 
war. Aides said he will tackle the perception that the world is in chaos 
and tie together the conflicts in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and 
elsewhere into the common ideological thread of fighting "Islamic 
fascism."

The effort will continue with other speeches in Washington and around 
the country, followed by a whirlwind tour of the Sept. 11 attack sites 
and a Sept. 19 address to the U.N. General Assembly. During a campaign 
stop in Arkansas yesterday, Bush denied that the efforts are connected 
to the election campaign.

"They're not political speeches," he said. "They're speeches about the 
future of this country, and they're speeches to make it clear that if we 
retreat before the job is done, this nation would become even more in 
jeopardy. These are important times, and I seriously hope people 
wouldn't politicize these issues that I'm going to talk about."

The Democratic strategy for the next few weeks is twofold: First, punch 
back every time Republicans challenge their commitment to national 
security. Yesterday, for instance, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi 
(Calif.) was among the half-dozen leading Democrats to strike back at 
Rumsfeld by noontime. "Secretary Rumsfeld's efforts to smear critics of 
the Bush administration's Iraq policy are a pathetic attempt to shift 
the public's attention from his repeated failure to manage the conduct 
of the war competently," she said.

At the same time, Democrats plan a series of events in which to condemn 
Bush's Iraq policy and amplify their charge that Iraq is not a central 
front in the campaign against terrorism. In a late-morning conference 
call, Sen. Jack Reed (R.I.), the Democrats' leading spokesman on 
national security issues, said only a small minority of those involved 
in the bloodshed in Iraq are the kind of international terrorists the 
United States should be hunting down.

Unlike in the past two elections, it is not clear which party benefits 
most from these debates. Most polls show that the public is essentially 
split over which party will keep the United States safe from terrorists. 
Both sides anticipate that Bush and other Republicans will get a slight 
bump from the Sept. 11 anniversary and the public's renewed focus on 
terrorism on that day, but that will not end the focus. "Over the next 
69 days," Mehlman said, "there will be an important discussion in 
America over what it takes to make America safe."

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

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