War and protests

The new worries of Rep. Norman Dicks, a hawkish Democrat who helped push the Iraqi war resolution through Congress, go a long way toward explaining why George W. Bush could soon be in one of the biggest struggles of his presidency.

The Washington state congressman fears, as do some Pentagon generals, that Bush will provoke Vietnam-like demonstrations in American streets, not just in Arab ones, if he goes to war against Iraq before making a convincing case that Saddam Hussein is lying when he says he has no weapons of mass destruction.

Even as they put the finishing touches on plans for invading Iraq, some top military officers share Dicks's fears. One general went so far as to predict, in an interview with National Journal, that there could be riots in U.S. cities if Bush is perceived as jumping into war and not giving United Nations inspections in Iraq a chance. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., outgoing chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Richard G. Lugar, R-Ind., incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, are among the lawmakers urging Bush to talk and act judiciously during the inspection process or risk losing the public opinion war at home and abroad.

Although Bush persuaded an overwhelming majority of senators and representatives to support the resolution authorizing him to go to war against Iraq, he must convince their constituents of the rightness of his policies in this new, delicate phase. Dicks is typical of the members of Congress making soundings back home and conditioning their support for the president's war policies accordingly.

"I just hear what people out here say to me in my district," says Dicks, who represents a heavily blue-collar area on the banks of Puget Sound that is home to a big Navy shipyard in Bremerton. "People say to me, `What is this? I thought we were going to have the inspections.' It looks to people like we're going to war regardless of the inspections."

Would Dicks-one of the House floor managers of the Iraq resolution-stop supporting the president if he invaded Iraq before allowing the inspections to run their course?

"I don't want to box myself in here," Dicks replied, "because having voted for this resolution, I want to support [the president]. But I just hope that we can find tangible evidence that will be persuasive to the American people and our allies. It will make it a lot easier. Without something tangible from somewhere to justify" an invasion, "it's going to be a painful episode."

"I want to hear what the inspectors say," Dicks said in urging Bush to keep his pistol in its holster for a decent interval. "I want to hear what the administration says. If they've got a smoking gun, then they better be able to demonstrate that." Verbal claims will not be enough, said Dicks, a senior Democrat on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. Dicks noted that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made some claims about Iraqi weapons that the U.N. inspectors checked out and could not validate. "So that's worrisome," he added.

Sen. John W. Warner, R-Va., incoming Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, agreed with Dicks that the White House will have to give what evidence it has against Saddam. At some point the Bush administration "has to open the kimono at least halfway," Warner said.

Dicks, like many moderate politicians of both parties, also worries about the image of the United States bullying puny Iraq without first making a compelling case for acting as the world's toughest cop. "The problem is that people think of us as a great country that doesn't beat on people," Dicks said. "People are very troubled about the prospect of the United States' going to war without clear and convincing evidence" that Iraq threatens the world with nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. "It troubles me, too. I struggle with that. This is not part of our tradition."

Told that senior generals in the Pentagon fear that invading Iraq too hastily would bring back their Vietnam nightmare of fighting a war while Americans were protesting it in the streets, Dicks said he had seen early signs of that sentiment around Bremerton. If Bush fails to make his case before invading Iraq, Dicks said, "I think you're going to have real problems with the American people. I think you're going to have demonstrations. I see posters already around various public places in my district saying, `Come to the demonstration. We want peace in Iraq.' People are stirred up about this."

If Bush faces uncertainty from moderates who want him to avoid pushing toward war too quickly, he could also face a backlash from conservative hard-liners at home-and damage to U.S. credibility abroad-if he does not go to war. Bush has already softened his initial position, stretching the definition of "regime change" to mean that Saddam could stay in power if he disarmed, a formulation Secretary of State Colin L. Powell put forward. But if inspectors fail to disarm Iraq, or fail to find the weapons of mass destruction that U.S. intelligence says are there, would Bush still go to war to fulfill his vow to disarm Saddam even if it required the United States to act unilaterally?

Between now and Christmas, Bush will confront these other dilemmas as he weighs his decision about whether to go to war against Iraq:

• U.N. inspections. How can the administration hurry them up and direct the inspectors to Saddam's likely hiding places for weapons without politicizing the process and losing members of the anti-Saddam coalition? Hans Blix, chairman of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), has pointedly reminded Bush that the inspectors work for the United Nations, not the White House. Yet the longer the inspections are allowed to drag on, the harder it will be to hold together the already loose coalition of nations willing to attack Iraq, diplomats warn.
• Military resistance. How can Bush allay the concerns of top military leaders that their forces will be tied down for decades trying to keep the peace in a postwar Iraq? The Afghanistan experience, in which the administration has found no other nation both willing and able to help pacify the countryside outside Kabul, is not encouraging. Bush came to office vowing not to overextend the military, as he said President Clinton did, by engaging in peacekeeping around the world. But how else would Bush stabilize a post-Saddam Iraq?
• Home-front backlash. How will the public react when Bush activates as many as 250,000 reservists to back up the active forces abroad and help protect airports, bridges, seaports, and vulnerable points on the American home front? For fear of a public reaction at home, President Johnson rejected the pleas of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to activate large numbers of reservists for the Vietnam War.
• Economic implications. How would Bush pay for a war against Iraq, given a sluggish U.S. economy and ballooning deficits? Rep. John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina, a senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, typified the concern of many in Congress earlier this year when he told National Journal, "Before we go to war we should figure out how we're going to pay for it." Already Democrats see the disappearance of the Clinton-era budget surplus and rising unemployment as campaign issues for Election 2004-issues they capitalized on to defeat Bush's father, George H.W. Bush, even though he had won the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
• National security risks. What if the war in Iraq triggers widespread unrest and conflict in the Middle East and Persian Gulf? And what if the war invites retaliatory attacks on the American homeland that continue into election year 2004?

President Bush is now in a battle for hearts and minds all over the world.