Iraq Debate Pits Uncertainty Against Anxiety

"We think we can win that debate," said one senior GOP strategist familiar with White House thinking, who requested anonymity when discussing internal party deliberations. "We won it in 2004, and the Iraq war was not particularly popular then. It is better when we debate other people instead of debating events."

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-gamble16jun16,1,3227687.story?coll=la-news-a_section

From the Los Angeles Times
NEWS ANALYSIS
Iraq Debate Pits Uncertainty Against Anxiety
Republicans think their strength is in setting a path for the future. The risk is that voters will look unhappily at how they got to the present.

By Ronald Brownstein Times Staff Writer

June 16, 2006

WASHINGTON — The new Republican drive to focus attention on the Iraq war represents a high-stakes gamble: that doubts about the direction Democrats might set on national security exceed anxieties about the course charted by President Bush.

Through a series of high-profile efforts culminating Thursday with sustained House and Senate debates on the war, the White House and congressional Republicans are aiming to portray Democrats as too soft and too divided to steer the Iraq conflict to a successful conclusion.

But in the process, Republicans risk deepening their identification with a war that, surveys show, still sparks skepticism and concern among most Americans — even after the spike in public support that followed the killing of Abu Musab Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. <snip>

The political fallout from this escalating confrontation in November's midterm election may pivot on which three words voters find more troubling: "cut and run" or "stay the course." <snip>