Analysis: GOP Senators Nervous About War

2007-07-21

Source: Associated Press

Senate Republicans are growing increasingly nervous defending the war in Iraq, and Democrats more confident in their attempts to end it.

More than a year before the 2008 elections, it is a political role reversal that bodes ill for President Bush's war strategy, not to mention his recent statement that Congress' role should merely be "funding the troops."

Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, made that clear Friday when he dismissed any suggestion that it could be November before a verdict is possible on the effects of the administration's current troop increase.

"September is the month we're looking at," he said unequivocally.

Yet as the party leader, McConnell is more circumspect than many Republicans in his characterization of the administration's war strategy. Asked earlier in the week whether he agreed that the conflict had been badly mismanaged - as Sen. John McCain has said for months - McConnell declined to respond.

Not so Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo.

"The strategy we had before was not the right strategy," he told reporters at midweek. "We should have had a counterinsurgency strategy."

By his remarks, Bond made it clear he meant the strategy was wrong from the time Saddam Hussein was deposed until this past January, when Gen. David Petraeus was installed as top military commander. That's a span of nearly four years.

Asked who bore responsibility for the error, Bond said, "Ultimately, obviously, the president."

Should any blame fall on Congress - under Republican control the entire time?

"Congress was not running the war," Bond replied.

It is not only the mood that is changing among Republicans. So, too, the rhetoric.

"Cut and run," has largely come and gone as an insult to hurl at Democrats, as Republicans themselves contemplate a change in course.

It also is the mission they envision changing as they try to salvage what they can from a war that has taken the lives of more than 3,600 U.S. troops and cost more than $400 billion.

Their once-clear vision of Iraq as a stable, self-sustaining democracy is faded.

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