- WASHINGTON -- President George
W Bush is throwing baseballs and focusing his speeches on love and jobs
- almost anything but the turmoil in Iraq - as Washington insists that
talk of a crisis is overblown.
-
- But a new poll suggested that scepticism is growing over
his Iraq policy, a reminder of the need for a sign of success there by
the late summer when many voters are expected to make up their minds before
November's presidential election.
-
- Following last week's gruesome killing of four civilian
security contractors in Fallujah, 53 per cent of people disapprove of Mr
Bush's policy in Iraq, up from 37 per cent in January, according to the
poll by the Pew Research Centre.
-
- Crucially for the White House, backing for the decision
to go to war has not changed. The poll concluded that 57 per cent think
America was right to invade Iraq. But Mr Bush's job approval was down to
43 per cent, a low point of his presidency. It was about 56 per cent in
January.
-
- Mr Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney donned baseball
shirts to deliver a clear message of: "Crisis? What crisis?"
-
- Throwing a near-perfect pitch from the mound in a stadium
in St Louis and brimming with his trademark homespun good cheer, Mr Bush
formally opened the 2004 Major League season.
-
- At the same time, Mr Cheney threw the first pitch in
Cincinnati, where the local team was playing the highly favoured Chicago
Cubs.
-
- The photographs could not have been bettered by the White
House image-makers and will have had a considerably more favourable reception
in the heartland than the pictures of Mr Bush's Democratic challenger,
Senator John Kerry, snowboarding last month. At the end of one of the rockiest
weeks in his campaign, Mr Kerry headed to the fashionable ski resort of
Ketchum, about as far as removed from most Americans' aspirations as you
can get.
-
- But that was last month. Yesterday, even as Mr Bush was
telling voters in Arkansas about "love" and stressing that the
worst times in the economy were over, debate was raging in Washington over
his Iraq policy.
-
- Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, confirmed that
the Pentagon was considering what he had long deemed unnecessary, sending
more troops. "They will decide what they need and they will get what
they need," he said.
-
- But he reiterated Mr Bush's insistence on Monday that
the June 30 deadline for the transfer of sovereignty in Iraq would not
be shifted.
-
- While the Democrats are careful not to be seen to waver
on their commitment to the occupation, the veteran liberal, Senator Ted
Kennedy, one of Mr Kerry's closest supporters, launched a rhetorical blast
at Mr Bush, comparing Iraq with the Vietnam War.
-
- Republicans point out that that conflict claimed 58,000
American lives, rather more than the 600 killed to date in Iraq. And sources
close to the Pentagon say the mood in the administration is far from panicked,
and that the clampdown on Moqtada al-Sadr's militia is long overdue.
-
- "I don't think we are in a pickle," said Michael
Rubin, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank
with close ties to the administration.
-
- The dilemma for the White House is that it needs to prove
to the heartland that it is winning in Iraq and yet one of the means of
doing that, sending more troops, risks undermining the national morale.
-
- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/04/07/
wirq107.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/04/07/ixnewstop.html
|