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Washington expects more lethal attacks in the coming months as the guerrillas step up their campaign to derail the referendum on the Iraqi constitution in October and a new national election in December. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld flew to Baghdad on July 27 to pressure the country's feuding political leaders to agree on a draft constitution by the Aug. 15 deadline. The constitutional committee has made limited progress on some thorny issues, such as the role of Islam in a new government, but it's at odds on others. Kurds in the north and Shi'ites in the south, for example, are demanding a loose federal form of government that gives them autonomy to control revenues from the oil fields in their regions. The Sunnis, who lost political clout when they boycotted elections in January, strongly oppose such a plan, fearing it would lead to partitioning the country--and leave them with nothing but the empty desert in the middle.
Whenever the administration's twin tracks in Iraq get snarled, American support for the war declines. According to an Associated Press--Ipsos poll, public approval of George W. Bush's handling of the war fell to 38% last week, an all-time low. White House officials insist the President will not be scared out of Iraq by the insurgents, much less by falling polls. "We will stay the course," Bush declared last week from his Texas ranch as he began a month's vacation. "We will complete the job in Iraq." Still, Administration officials hit the phones all week long to reassure the factions in Iraq that the U.S. is not going to pull out before Iraqi security forces are ready to take over.
Just as they reinvented their justifications for going to war in Iraq when no weapons of mass destruction were found, Administration officials have begun to sound more nimble about when the job will be done. When the insurgency came to life in the months after the March 2003 invasion, the President vowed that U.S. forces would not withdraw until the rebels were crushed. But U.S. officials now believe that every province does not need to be completely pacified before U.S. troops pull out. In the past three months, the Pentagon has concluded that the war against the insurgents "is not winnable in the near term," says Seth Jones, an Iraq expert at the Rand Corp. Pentagon officers have been reviewing other insurgencies' histories, which indicate that the rebels take, on average, nine years to defeat.