Turnaround on war issue?

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Political cracks are appearing in the Democrats' once-unified opposition to the war in Iraq and a prominent independent pollster says it's not "a slam dunk" issue for them anymore.

One week before Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. military commander in Iraq, gives his report to Congress, Republican leadership officials express new confidence that Americans are now far more willing to give President Bush's troop surge a longer chance to work.

The mood shift is the result of reports from journalists, lawmakers and others returning from Iraq, including Democrats who say progress is being made in terrorist-infested trouble-spots and that levels of sectarian violence have fallen dramatically this summer.

At the same time, the grass-roots message coming back as Republican lawmakers return from their August recess is that "we're hearing less about Iraq" from voters, a senior House Republican leadership official told me. From the beginning, the hope of the troop surge was not to say it has fully stabilized Iraq and ended the violence, something that won't happen anytime soon. Rather, it was to show that at least progress was being made, that in key regions al Qaeda terrorists can be driven out as a result of new alliances between Sunni leaders and U.S. and Iraqi military forces.

Several weeks of positive reports from Iraq have not only divided the Democrats but have thrown them on the defensive on an issue that has clearly lost some of its antiwar potency with voters.

Independent pollster John Zogby last week reported Republicans indeed made gains last month among voters, with a clear 54 percent majority now saying they believe the war can be won.

Still, it's an issue on which Americans remain polarized. "When you look at the majorities, its overwhelmingly Republicans and underwhelmingly Democrats. So in that sense, it's confusing for the candidates, especially in the general election, and it's not necessarily a slam dunk issue for the Democrats," Mr. Zogby told me.

"Whatever it may take for the Democrats to appeal to his or her base, 'we've lost, let's get out now' is not necessarily what the general electorate wants to hear, particularly swing voters. It also means for Democrats that unless they figure out an appealing answer to the question how do we get out, this could spell trouble for them," he said.

What a difference Zogby's polls find from a month ago when the Democrats' antiwar base breathed fire and expected to ride the war issue all the way to the White House next year.

"Left-wing activists and their allies in Congress were banking on August as a watershed for the antiwar movement. But as the calendar turns to September, they're finding that these plans completely and utterly failed," said House Republican leader John Boehner.

Underscoring all of this are the surprisingly close head-to-head matchups among the presidential front-runners. If opposition to the way the war is going in Iraq was the decisive issue in the American electorate, why aren't Democratic front-runners like Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama running away in the polls? Republican Rudolph Giuliani, an unabashed war supporter, ran virtually neck and neck with them in the latest Rasmussen poll and ahead of them in other voter surveys.

Even in a matchup with lesser-known Republican Fred Thompson, the former senator from Tennessee, also a war backer, Mrs. Clinton's anemic 4-point lead was within the margin for error.

Another small but important shift in the political barometer: Republicans have regained their edge, however tenuous, on which party voters trust more to keep the country safe from terrorists. "Republicans now claim a narrow 44 percent to 43 percent edge on that topic," Rasmussen reports.

With progress on the ground in Iraq, and signs Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government is close to enacting political reforms this month, including adding more Sunnis to the government, there is more talk of preliminary troop withdrawals.

Expressing increased confidence that the surge has achieved what few thought possible in January, Mr. Bush, in a surprise visit to Anbar Province on Monday, spoke more hopefully of troop withdrawals "if the kind of success we are seeing continues." Notably, Mr. Bush spoke not in terms of if, but "when we begin to draw down troops from Iraq," a message pointedly aimed at his Democratic critics who may see their strongest campaign issue slowly dissolve before their eyes.

Indeed, troop withdrawals by next year are a foregone conclusion now, because tour of duty schedules will have reached their limit in 2008, requiring some level of downsizing. The question then becomes how will the mission be readjusted with fewer forces?

The evolving answer to that question will be the continuing transfer of security responsibilities to Iraqi military forces, with the U.S. troops shifting to a strategic back-up and training mission for as long as it takes for the Iraqis to fully defend their country on their own.

Donald Lambro, chief political correspondent of The Washington Times, is a nationally syndicated columnist.