White House Showing Short-Term Success on Iraq

The Bush White House is showing substantial adeptness in dealing with the short-term politics of Iraq. It helped to block a bipartisan Senate move opposing its troop increase plan and issued a budget with more candor on war costs than in previous years.

But its moves are unlikely to bring long-term benefits. Senate maneuvering produced unwanted headlines blaming the GOP for preventing an Iraq debate. Congressional pressure to end the war is growing, especially among senators who have to run in 2008.

And the White House continues to understate the war's long-term costs, while conceding that its massive Iraq spending is causing domestic program cuts.

It explains why clever short-term political maneuvering won't save President Bush and his party from another electoral disaster if the effort in Iraq doesn't fare far better by 2008, a point noted to reporters by former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, one of the many GOP presidential hopefuls.

"A lot of it depends on how the war is going a year from now," Mr. Huckabee said at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast Tuesday. "If the wheels are coming off even more, then everything about the war is a huge problem."

The White House is mainly trying to make the best of a bad situation, especially in a Senate where it takes more votes than either side can muster to bring war-related proposals to a vote.

Both parties are playing politics with the issue. GOP war critics helped block a nonbinding Democratic-led measure aimed at embarrassing Mr. Bush by putting the Senate on record against his plan to send 21,500 more combat troops to Iraq.

Republican leaders offered to vote on the proposal if the GOP could present a countermeasure barring curbs on funds for Iraq. That was designed to embarrass Democrats unwilling to take that more drastic step, so it was blocked by Democratic leaders.

Meanwhile, the administration released its new budget amid some fanfare that it had stopped trying to make its numbers look good by omitting war costs from the totals.

But the massive fiscal blueprint released Monday displayed the limits to its new candor. Funding requests for the war were massive: an additional $235.1 billion for this fiscal year and the one starting Oct. 1, bringing the total for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to $661.9 billion through Sept. 30, 2008.

And the candor stopped there. For 2009, the administration reverted to its prior practice of sticking in a meaningless holding figure of $50 billion, undoubtedly well below the likely real costs.

It was the second time in a week that it tripped over its efforts to hide war costs. Last week, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the White House had understated the cost of the president's plan by failing to include costs of logistical and support troops likely to be needed to back the 21,500 combat troops.

Mr. Bush also asked for sharp increases in the basic Pentagon budget, some for such war-related costs as replacing military equipment and training Iraqi and Afghan security forces. That brought the projected increase in defense spending during his administration to more than 60 percent.

At the same time, the president proclaimed that, thanks to a growing economy and spending restraint, the budget will be balanced in 2012. But he made clear he was mainly restraining spending for domestic programs. The administration blueprint would eliminate or cut 141 programs at a savings of $12 billion.

The balanced budget forecast is suspect because it omits most anti-terror funds after 2008 and the cost of expected legislation to limit the number of middle-class families paying the alternative minimum tax, originally aimed at making the wealthy pay their fair share.

Given all this, it's hardly surprising that a GOP White House hopeful like Mr. Huckabee wants to separate himself from Mr. Bush's priorities. He called for more domestic spending and said that, just because he's a Republican, he didn't think he'd be held "held responsible for what they perceive as George Bush's foreign policy mistakes."