20 JANUARY 2007, Page 13

Make or break for President Bush

James Forsyth says that the President will not seek to compromise on Iraq in his penultimate State of the Union address: he wants to be 'acquitted on all charges' president George W. Bush has always delivered the State of the Union with a triumph in the war on terror or an election to brag about, a majority of Republicans in Congress and a united party behind him Not this Tuesday, though. In the last few weeks he has been forced to admit that the United States is 'not winning' in Iraq and that a change of strategy is needed. His party has lost control of both branches of Congress for the first time in his presidency and his fellow Republicans are abandoning him at a rate that would awe rats leaving the Titanic. If this were not enough, one of Bush's former senior aides is on trial for perjury and obstruction of justice in a case that will rake up all the old controversies about Iraq and intelligence. To top things off, Congress is set to welcome the President with a resolution making clear its disapproval of his new Iraq policy, and an announcement from Hillary Clinton that she will formally enter the race for president could wrest the spotlight away from Bush with brutal speed.

Bush, though, isn't in the mood to back down. One Washingtonian familiar with the attitude inside the White House jokes that Bush 'doesn't want to take a plea bargain on this. He wants to be acquitted on all charges'. So Bush has quietly binned the famous Iraq Study Group Report, which offered him bipartisan cover for a gradual withdrawal, and instead got himself a new general and called for reinforcements. The State of the Union gives Bush an opportunity to sell his new policy — the success or failure of which will define the world we live in — to a sceptical public.

Bush bet his presidency on Iraq when he decided to invade in 2003; he bet his party on it when he decided to surge rather than slink away. If Iraq is lost, it will destroy the Republicans' reputation on national security for at least a generation. Without this trump card, they will start every national election in a very similar position to the Tories after Black Wednesday. And yet Democratic opposition to Bush's new policy will only go so far. They know that if they deny the funding for the surge, the Republicans will have an opportunity to pin the blame on them. Some Democrats — including the ageing liberal lion Teddy Kennedy, the angry Marine vet Jack Murtha and the principled Dennis Kucinich — will advocate using the power of the purse to thwart the President. But the bulk of the party is too scared of the political consequences of such a move to go along with it. The debate will, however, push the Democrats further left on national security. The populist John Edwards is already trying to use the funding issue to outflank Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (who joined the presidential race on Tuesday), his main rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, who, as senators, will have to vote on it.

Iraq will, as it must, dominate the speech. The rhetorical challenge for Bush is to argue that the situation is so perilous that more troops must be sent without inviting the obvious riposte: you got us into this mess so why should we trust you to fix it? The difficulty of Bush's predicament is demonstrated by the failure of his Iraq poll rating to improve in the wake of his recent televised address. This contravenes the political rule that says that a prime-time TV appearance always gives the President a poll boost. The White House can take some solace, though, from the fact that the public isn't ignoring Bush on Iraq. More people watched his recent speech than either of his last two State of the Union addresses. Bush must hope that he can use this trip to the presidential bully pulpit to build on the groundwork of his first speech, which at least demonstrated that he understood that something in Iraq had to change.

A recent poll showed that 50 per cent of Americans believe that the Iraq conflict will end in a stalemate. If you add them to those who think it will end in defeat — 18 per cent — you get almost exactly the number that now oppose the war — 67 per cent. The challenge for Bush is to persuade those who think it will end in a stalemate that the actual choice is between victory and defeat; and that an American defeat will be a victory for America's two biggest enemies, Iran and alQa'eda. Bush is therefore likely to shy away from talking about the dangers of an Iraqi civil war — at the moment there is little appetite in the United States for `babysitting' such a conflict — and instead stress the boost that withdrawal would give to America's principal Shiite and Sunni enemies. Expect Bush to reiterate his message to President Ahmadinejad that, 'If we catch your people inside the country harming US citizens or Iraqi citizens, you know, we will deal with them.'

Bush will also need to persuade people that victory in the broader war on terror will be impossible if America is defeated in Iraq, and that the enemy will follow America home, unlike in Vietnam. The 'Vietnam syndrome' is actually hurting Bush in a different way to what most people think. The problem is that the foreign policy elite complacently believes that Vietnam proves that the consequences of defeat are never as bad as everyone expects.

The war is taking up all of the President's political capital at the moment. Indeed, he has had to dip heavily into John McCain and Joe Lieberman's accounts just to keep himself solvent. So it is unlikely that there will be any other great schemes in the speech, even if it is still replete with flourishes such as last year's admission that 'America is addicted to oil', which for all its supposed novelty merely built on an injunction in the 2002 address to make the country 'less dependent on foreign oil'.

There will, of course, be issues other than Iraq. Bush will appeal — in vain — for Congress to renew his fast-track negotiating authority for trade deals. His failure to get this authority will finally kill Doha, and trade liberalisation will have to wait for the next president — and possibly the president after that, considering the alarming rise of protectionist sentiment in the Democratic party.

The President will also appeal for everyone to come to the table with no preconditions and talk about social security reform. Such an appeal will sound pleasantly bipartisan, but it won't get anywhere as long as the Democrats and the administration remain so far apart on whether tax rises are needed to fund such a deal. There'll also be a shameless call to balance the budget and some tweaks to the tax code to make health insurance more affordable for individuals.

What Bush would really like to propose is immigration reform. He tells allies that 'after the war I talk about this more than any other issue' and the new Congress would be amenable to Bush's thinking But the Republican split on immigration makes the Tory divide over Europe in the 1990s look like a model for civil, internal party dialogue. Considering how much Bush needs to keep his party with him on Iraq, it is unlikely that he will risk an all-out split over immigration. Yet Bush is likely to remind Americans that he favours a comprehensive solution to the problem, rather than just building a fence along the Mexican border, and is hopeful that he will be able to make progress on it before he leaves office.

Tony Blair will be cheered by Bush's words on climate change and Israel/ Palestine. The administration has explicitly denied British press reports of a major shift on climate change. But the political tide in the United States is turning, as demonstrated by the fact that McCain and Obama are joint sponsors of a climate change bill in the Senate and that even the White House's point man on the issue is prepared to tell a columnist that a carbon tax or cap and trade would be an 'elegant' solution to the problem. Consider, too, that Bush said in 2001 that 'my administration is committed to a leadership role on the issue of climate change'. So Bush might well deliver some warm, if not Stern, words on the topic. But he'll do so by linking it to energy security. A poll showed that Americans wanted Congress to make 'reducing dependence on foreign oil' a key national security priority by a 16 per cent margin over the next most popular goal, 'combating terrorism'. Bush will also talk up Condi Rice's recent work on Middle East peace, aware that public American involvement on the issue is crucial to keeping together the emerging antiIranian alliance.

The last two years of Bush's presidency will be critically important despite his lameduck status. If when Bush leaves office we're debating whether he deserves to replace Grover Cleveland and Herbert Hoover in the White House hall of shame, then the forces of fundamentalism will be ascendant in both the Shiite and Sunni worlds and America will be a nervous and defeated power. Like it or not, the state of our world depends on how the Bush presidency ends.

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