That emerging Republican approach reflects, at least for now, the success of a White House effort to bring a skittish party behind Mr. Bush on the war after months of political ambivalence in some vocal quarters. As President Bush offered another defense of his Iraq policy during a visit to Vienna on Wednesday, Republicans acknowledged that it was a strategy of necessity, an effort to turn what some party leaders had feared could become the party's greatest liability into an advantage in the midterm elections.To anyone who is old enough to remember the, um, last throes of the war in Vietnam, this all has an eerie sense of deja vu. Back then the Nixon administration had no plan for ending the war, but they sure knew how to throw the red meat. So what it comes down to is that the war that was started by a Republican administration based on a series of lies is now seen as a political ploy to attack their opponents and win more seats in Congress. The president's minions do not offer anything other than "stay the course," which, considering the last three years, means more deaths of American soldiers, more insurgents coming in from other places like Afghanistan (which has its own resurgent insurgency), and a hardening of the resolve of the citizenry to see the Americans get out. Even the new Iraqi government has said that the best way to prove that they are capable of self-rule is for the American troops to leave. If the administration had put as much energy into tracking down the real terrorists who attacked us as they did in trying to win elections, Osama bin Laden would have been caught or killed years ago.
The approach might yet be upended by more problems in Iraq, as Republicans were reminded this week with reports about two American servicemen who were abducted, tortured and apparently killed. Some polls show a majority of Americans continue to think that entering Iraq was a mistake, and pollsters say independent voters are particularly open to the idea of setting some sort of timetable for withdrawal, the very policy Democrats have embraced and Republicans are now fighting.
[...]
But people who attended a series of high-level meetings this month between White House and Congressional officials say President Bush's aides argued that it could be a politically fatal mistake for Republicans to walk away from the war in an election year.
The meetings were followed by the distribution of a 74-page briefing book to Congressional offices from the Pentagon to provide ammunition for what White House officials say will be a central line of attack against Democrats from now through the midterm elections: that the withdrawal being advocated by Democrats would mean thousands of troops would have died for nothing, would give extremists a launching pad from which to build an Islamo-fascist empire and would hand the United States its must humiliating defeat since Vietnam.
The biggest mistake the Democrats made was thinking that they could have an honest debate about the future of the war with the Republicans. But as the 74-page playbook makes clear, the Republicans' tactics of calling into question the patriotism of anyone who opposes them and using the sound bites to run for office brings a new definition of "cutting and running."
