The Political War Over The War

By David Paul Kuhn,
CBSNews.com Chief Political Writer

And as the country grapples with new threats, oceans that no longer protect it and the one-year anniversary of its first intercontinental pre-emptive war, politics invariably begs every motive in the midst of yet another wartime election.

Yet the tail rarely wags the dog. That the politics of war exists, no one doubts. But U.S. presidents do not start wars to insure their presidency; they try to end them. They try to withdraw troops. They promise to keep us out of future wars.

But wars cost presidencies - most often through their party's representation in Congress - greatly more than they assist them.

The party that controls the White House usually – but not always – maintains power if America is winning or has won, as in 1864 with Lincoln and 1944 with F.D.R. But if the country is bogged down in a stalemate, a losing war, Americans will change horses in the middle of the stream, as in 1952, when Eisenhower promised to solve Korea by a personal visit, and in 1968, when Nixon won the Oval Office with a "secret plan" to win Vietnam.

President Bush will only hold the White House if Americans believe the occupation of Iraq is not without end, if Americans don't continue to wake up daily to GI casualties, if he really can drastically diminish the American presence in Iraq by mid-summer and leave the country a better and more stable place than before the U.S. invasion of March 19, 2003.

"On the whole presidents go to war for external political reasons not for internal political reasons," historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. explains. "But war does not pay off politically."

Indeed, the last 150 years of American history proves more gamble than gain for presidents who wage war or have the burden of war thrust upon them.

In the wake of the United States' first imperial war, the Spanish American, Theodore Roosevelt won with a promise to defeat Spain and liberate Cuba. Woodrow Wilson lost both houses of Congress in 1918, after wining in 1916 on a promise to keep the U.S. out of WWI, only to enter the Great War a year later. Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 said he would not send American boys to fight in foreign wars. Pearl Harbor and a year later, the country was fully enveloped in WWII and F.D.R. lost seats in the Senate and the House in 1942.

Immersed in a new Cold War, General Dwight Eisenhower won the White House on a promise to visit Korea personally and end a stalemated war. In 1968, Lyndon Johnson lost seats in the House during the quagmire in Vietnam and was forced not to run for a second term.

George H.W. Bush, on the other hand, lost his presidency despite his victory in the Gulf War.

"President Bush's father won a really successful war and lost the presidency," says Alex Keysar, who teaches history and public policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "The primacy of domestic issues is very strong."

The first President Bush's disconnection from the drowning economy handed the presidency to an unknown Arkansas governor, Bill Clinton.

"President (George W.) Bush gets a lot of credit with the public for being very resolute in his reaction to the attack on 9/11 and it spills over into opinions about him in general," explains Thomas Riehle, an expert on U.S. politics and public affairs at the nonpartisan polling institute Ipsos.

Like his father, Mr. Bush's problem, says Riehle, is that "people don't believe he feels the same way about the economy, that he cares more about domestic concerns more than the war in Iraq or the war on terrorism."

Separating the war in Iraq from the war on terror is at the core of this general election. Sen. John Kerry vows to continue the war on terror. However, the presumptive Democratic nominee, who voted for the 2003 resolution authorizing the war in Iraq, argues that he did not authorize the president's unilateral approach.

Where Mr. Bush calls himself unwavering, Kerry calls him stubborn. Where Kerry references his heroic Vietnam War record (three Purple Hearts), President Bush points to Kerry's voting record limiting defense budgets.

Mr. Bush argues whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction or not, it was at the center of the war on terror. The two wars are inseparable to the Bush administration. To Kerry, Iraq was a distraction from the war on terror and although he intends, like Mr. Bush, to keep an American military presence in Iraq, he says the war could have been waged with more allies and the postwar occupation planned more effectively.

"I think this war will hurt the president," Keysar says. "The opposition to the war has produced a more passionate base than Democrats have had in a very long time."

Certainly the candidacy of former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, forced Kerry to take a stronger anti-war stance, arguably causing him last year to oppose the president's request for $87 billion to fund security and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Polls show that Americans support the war on terrorism by a 2 to 1 margin, but the approval rating for the war in Iraq is narrower, and the general election remains a dead heat. With more than 2 million jobs lost since Mr. Bush took office, the White House is aware that the economy can still end his presidency. Yet if the war in Iraq gets significantly worse, he will almost surly lose.

On Friday, the president will speak to the country about the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan, highlighting progress. Kerry is still considering a staff fact-finding trip to Iraq.

Just this week, Mr. Bush was reminded of how war can backfire for an incumbent leader. One of his few Western European allies in the Iraq war, Spain's Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, lost his reelection effort just 72 hours after the country's worst terrorist bombing ever. With more than 200 dead, Spaniards blamed the attack on the country's involvement in Iraq.

Meanwhile, the first advertising campaign of the Bush re-election effort featured images of Ground Zero, and with the Republican convention scheduled in New York one week before the third anniversary of Sept. 11, Mr. Bush is taking every opportunity to remind voters that he is a wartime president.

"Presidents don't go into war for political profit but they may exploit them, as Bush apparently intends to do," says Schlesinger, who served on John F. Kennedy's staff. "Of course he took it to ludicrous extremes when he impersonated Tom Cruise, after all. Eisenhower and Kennedy – Eisenhower was a general, Kennedy was a war hero – neither of them ever put on uniforms when they were president."

Many in the White House now privately regret the May 2003 aircraft carrier landing, where Mr. Bush declared an end to major combat operations beneath a "Mission Accomplished" banner. More U.S. soldiers have died since the president's declaration than before.

But in his other wartime exploit, Mr. Bush succeeded in portraying himself on presidential terms – making a Thanksgiving visit to U.S. troops in Iraq in possibly the most dangerous presidential trip since Lincoln went to Richmond shortly after Union Troops sacked the city.

"It is indefinable where one crosses the line of low partisan politics and interest in the realm of high politics of statecraft," says Greg Foster, who specializes in strategy and civil and military relations at the National Defense University. "That presidents have underlying personal-political motives is an inevitable part of politics at a national level."

After Pearl Harbor, the last great attack on American soil before Sept. 11, F.D.R. refuted rumors of failing health and won an unprecedented fourth term by referencing WWII from the start of his campaign to Election Day. And so, this president will speak of his war, too, as all commander-in-chiefs do.

"Whether the war helps or hurts President Bush it defines him entirely and with neither party having a clear advantage on the war, we can only wait and see what happens in Iraq," Riehle says. "But in the end, people are going to make a judgment about whether they are better or worse off than they were a year ago, before the war in Iraq, both in their wallets and in their security."