Bush Can Deal McCain Harm With Iraq Move

WASHINGTON — With President Bush leaning toward an infusion of troops to stabilize Baghdad, Iraq, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, Senator McCain, could find himself vulnerable in the 2008 election.

Call it Mr. Bush's parting shot to his old sparring partner, the Arizona senator who has been positioning himself as the most hawkish of the Republican contenders by calling for between 15,000 and 30,000 extra troops to be sent to Iraq. Unless the president's new strategy proves a clear success by the beginning of 2008, Mr. McCain could find his judgment on matters of national security being called into question.

The chairman of the American Conservative Union, David Keane, said yesterday that Mr. McCain risks having opponents in the 2008 campaign refer to the new war strategy as the "McCain-Bush plan." And the editor and publisher of the Rothenberg Political Report, Stuart Rothenberg, called Mr. McCain's war position "risky." "He is not purely the guy offering the criticism now. Democrats and his fellow Republicans could criticize him for owning the policy," Mr. Rothenberg said.

Mr. Bush has kept mum on any details of the new Iraq strategy, which he will unveil next month. But administration officials say he is planning to spurn the advice of his top commanders and call for up to 30,000 more troops in Iraq by extending the stays of some active-duty personnel already there and calling up their replacements earlier.

The plan is similar to the ideas Mr. McCain first outlined on ABC's "This Week" on November 20, when he said he could not support the war unless the president sent enough troops to fight it.

Yesterday, Mr. McCain was in Baghdad, where he described the violence as "very, very serious." "It requires an injection of additional troops to control the situation and to allow the political process to proceed," he said, adding that he would favor an increase of between 15,000 and 30,000 troops.

Mr. McCain's position, referred to in the Pentagon as "Go Big," was rejected publicly by Mr. Bush in the 2004 and 2006 campaign seasons. The president said then that he would not send more troops to a war when his generals had not asked for them.

But that strategy may be changing. On Wednesday, after meeting with military and civilian leaders at the Pentagon, Mr. Bush said he would reject "ideas that would lead to defeat." Such ideas, he said, include "leaving before the job is done" and "not helping this government take the necessary and hard steps to be able to do its job."

Any move to send more troops to Iraq or extend the tours of duty of the soldiers there will likely meet with fierce resistance within the military. The Army's top general, Peter Schoomaker, warned yesterday that the Army would "break" if it does not come up with 30,000 more recruits or starts using more Army reserves. The pivot from Mr. Bush ties Mr. McCain's presidential aspirations to the success of coalition forces in Iraq, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, Grover Norquist, said.

"McCain may have thought he was separating himself from any potential failure on Bush's part by giving advice he assumed wouldn't be taken," Mr. Norquist said. "Now Bush, avoiding being seen as being dictated to by Baker-Hamilton, is actually following McCain's advice. McCain better cross his fingers and hope Bush is successful."

The risk of calling for more troops and being associated with the war in 2008 is that almost every military expert analyzing the war has concluded — along with the recently released Baker-Hamilton report — that no strategic options offer any certainty of victory.

"It is unlikely that anything will turn things around in Iraq. That is the consensus among the professionals," a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Michael O'Hanlon, said. "But there is still some possibility of turning things around dramatically, and some degrees of failure are much worse than others. In that sense, it still matters what we end up accomplishing or failing to accomplish."

Mr. O'Hanlon, a Democrat, supported the war in 2003 and has not joined many in his party in ruling out the prospect of victory in Iraq. The political risk to Mr. McCain may not be as pronounced as other analysts are saying, he said. "One can still campaign on a plan, saying, ‘I wanted to push as hard as we could to give us a chance, but I have now concluded there is not a chance.' I certainly believe that this is the year, 2007, for the last big push. If that fails, though, all bets are off."