Bush's Big Political Gamble

News analysis by David Paul Kuhn, CBSNews.com Chief Political Writer

Fifteen months, more than $100 billion and 852 American fatalities after the U.S.-led invasion, Saddam Hussein is in custody and, as President Bush said Monday, the "Iraqi people have their country back." Speaking in Istanbul, where he was attending the NATO summit, the president added, "We have kept our word."
Monday's transfer of power to an Iraqi interim government, two days ahead of schedule, is of great symbolic importance to Iraqis, but little is expected to change on the ground for the short term.

While the Bush administration does retain political influence on a bureaucratic level, the transitional constitution limits the interim government to civil administrative control, including preparing for the January elections.

The shift in sovereignty will not affect the 130,000 U.S. troops who remain in Iraq, as well as the 30,000 from foreign nations.

Soldiers will continue to conduct military operations outside the interim government's authority. Under ideal circumstances, the Bush administration hopes that eventually – meaning prior to Election Day – the U.S.-led military coalition will take on a supporting role in Iraq. But the number of deployed soldiers is not expected to diminish significantly before U.S. voters hit the polls, in just 127 days.

"The transfer is important symbolically," said Steven Cook, an expert on U.S. Middle East policy at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. "But one of the classic definitions of sovereignty is having a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. At the same time, although ministries remain in the hands of Iraqis, you will find they are reliant on the United States."

Since April, the American public has been increasingly critical of the war on terror. For the first time, polls show that at least half of Americans do not think the United States did the "right thing" by invading Iraq.

The gauge by which Americans judge this war has chiefly been influenced by the continued news of U.S. casualties. A supporting role for the U.S. military would most likely lower the number of American deaths on the ground.

But whether the United States can take on a smaller role is unclear. For the next month, little should change. If Iraq begins to stabilize by October, the presumptive Democratic nominee, Sen. John Kerry, clearly will be reduced to an historical argument on the war.

"We deserve a president who knows how to get it right from the beginning," said Kerry on Monday in Boston, speaking by phone to the American Nurses Association. "The world is far more tattered and volatile than it was when this president came into office and I believe one of the reasons is the ill-advised way he went into Iraq."

But because Americans tend to look forward rather than backward, and often have short historical memories, the ends in Iraq will likely justify the means by which the president went about the war. Yet the ends, if positive, could be years away instead of months.

Though the original case for war was based upon claims Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, still not found, and largely disproved administrative inferences of ties between Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a stable Iraq may still be enough to justify this war for American voters.

If Iraq should stabilize and American deaths drastically diminish, Kerry's chief strategist Tad Devine admits the war could prove to be "helpful to the president" in his bid for reelection.

"I don't think that undermines the sense that voters, many of whom have come to [the belief] irrevocably, that the president made a terrible mistake and we have paid a dear price for it," Devine added.

The Bush administration's original objective in Iraq – a Democratic nation that is not a threat to the United States – will likely be less important to voters in the immediate sense than their sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, ceasing to die daily.

"But let's accept that as a real hypothetical possibility and let's also say there continues to be job creation until November... I think it is just as likely to mean that an issue of healthcare could be top of mind with people," Devine said. "I think health care is a hugely important issue that is bubbling beneath the service of the mega issues of war and the economy. Look at what we are doing on television; we are talking about healthcare."

The problem for Kerry is that the bad news from Iraq has been counterbalanced by good news on the economy. Yet President Bush only regains Americans' confidence if Iraq moves drastically closer to stabilization and farther from the months of chaotic combat that has plagued the embryonic stage of this new country.

It is that if, which is unforeseeable. What is clear is that with a U.S. marine currently being held hostage in Iraq, the situation is far from stable and farther from the ends necessary to rekindle U.S. public support to the war.

"We are going to wake up tomorrow morning, there are still going to be kidnappings, car bombings and there are still going to be U.S. troops being shot it," said Cook, of the Council on Foreign Relations.

"I'm not diminishing the symbolic importance. Clearly the wager [the Bush administration] is making is that, somehow, with Iraqis out in front and politically in charge, this will diminish the insurgency and will diminish the threat. That's the wager. But I wouldn't make that bet."

By David Paul Kuhn