Inviting a Referendum on the War

WASHINGTON - After tiptoeing around the question for months, the Democratic congressional leadership has finally decided to risk the chances of taking control of the House and Senate on making the November midterm elections a referendum on the Iraq war.

The letter to President Bush signed by a dozen party leaders, including minority leaders Nancy Pelosi in the House and Harry Reid in the Senate, confirms greater movement toward the view that the war has turned so sour that openly calling for a start to withdrawing U.S. troops can be a winning posture.

It calls for a "transition to a more limited mission" by year's end in the redeployment forces out of Iraq, which Republican leaders like party national chairman Ken Mehlman have dubbed "cut and run."

Until recently, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration had effectively rallied American public opinion behind a strong national security policy symbolized by the invasion of Iraq and tenacious pursuit of victory there.

In the 2002 and 2004 congressional elections and in the 2004 presidential election, that strategy, coupled with GOP allegations that the Democrats were either soft or divided on the Iraq war, delivered Republican successes at the polls.

Now for the first time the Democrats have indicated a willingness to call the Republicans' bluff on the premise that anything short of support for sticking it out would be political suicide for candidates in a nation captured by patriotic fervor.

The letter to Bush argued that "the open-ended commitment in Iraq that you have embraced cannot and should not be sustained" and "simply staying the course is not working. We need a new direction."

While the letter does not constitute an official Democratic Party position, it is a major step beyond the earlier separate calls for troop redeployments from Pelosi and several other party leaders in Congress. They include Sens. Ted Kennedy, Russ Feingold and John Kerry and Rep. John Murtha, a Vietnam combat veteran and longtime champion of the military.

The risk to the Democrats was immediately illustrated by a posting on the Republican National Committee Web site labeled "John Murtha's Cut-and-Run Tour," noting his plan to campaign for 41 Democratic candidates around the country supporting his plan to start redeploying American forces from Iraq by year's end. The posting noted that Murtha hadn't campaigned for any Democratic candidates for Congress in 2004.

With only minority strength in both House and Senate, proposals earlier this year to set a deadline for troop withdrawals from Iraq fell far short in the face of near-solid Republican opposition joined by some Democrats. The votes underscored the imperative for the Democrats to gain control of the House and/or the Senate this fall, if only to launch inquiries on the conduct on the war next year.

Only a few months ago, Pelosi and Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean, in separate meetings with reporters, declared that they wanted no part of making the midterm elections a referendum on the war. They contended then that the Bush administration offered as a much broader and vulnerable target a Republican "culture of corruption," personified by lobbyist Jack Abramoff and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who subsequently resigned the leadership and his seat.

The Democratic leaders saw in Bush's declining poll numbers evidence that his reputation as an effective leader was vulnerable to attack beyond his conduct of the war. Some cited the president's conspicuous failure last year to sell his plan to permit diversion of some Social Security taxes to stock-market investment. But now the Democrats, guided by the latest polls, see his performance as a wartime leader to be a fruitful target as well.

Mehlman for one welcomed the challenge. The letter to Bush, he said, clarified the choice facing the voters in November. White House political adviser Karl Rove, now out from under the shadow of possible indictment in the Valerie Plame CIA "outing" affair, can be expected to engineer the cut-and-run assault on the Democrats with his usual and effective relentlessness.