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The bad news from Iraq has taken a toll on President George W. Bush's popularity and thus on his chances for re-election.
In a Newsweek poll released May 15, for the first time a majority of Americans said that the war in Iraq had not been worth fighting. And Bush's approval rating fell to the lowest level of his presidency.
Can the president point to any gains from the efforts the United States has made in Iraq? He can in fact cite two, but it will be difficult for him to win political credit for them. One valuable result of the war is more or less invisible to the public. The other is only a potential achievement, which, if it does come to pass, will do so after the November election.
By ending Saddam Hussein's rule, the war not only liberated 23 million Iraqis from a murderous tyrant, it also erased a potential threat to the Middle East, the United States and the world. That threat came not from the chemical weapons Hussein was believed to possess in 2003 but rather from the nuclear weapons he might subsequently have acquired.
Had Hussein not been removed from power, the French and Russian effort to lift the United Nations-imposed sanctions on Iraq would probably have succeeded. With wider freedom of action, Hussein might well have achieved his goal of building or buying an atomic bomb. A nuclear- armed Saddam Hussein would have posed a serious threat, but because of the war it will never materialize.
Unfortunately for President Bush, these benefits of ousting Saddam Hussein are less evident. A potential threat is less frightening to the public than an actual danger, and removing the Iraqi dictator will therefore earn less gratitude than confronting an immediate threat.
The war does have the potential for providing a benefit that is more tangible and therefore likely to be more widely appreciated: the creation of an Iraqi government of a particular kind. To count as a gain from the war, a new Iraqi government does not have to resemble those of the Western democracies in every detail. It simply has to govern the country without persecuting and murdering its citizens or attacking its neighbors, as Hussein did, or professing a radical anti-Western ideology, as the rulers of Iraq's neighbor Iran do. To qualify as an asset to the United States and therefore a positive result of the war, that is, the new Iraqi government must merely be decent and stable.
The violence of the last six weeks - the attacks on American forces in the cities of Fallujah and Najaf - have not doomed the prospects for such an outcome. Both are the work of small but highly motivated minorities; neither represents a country-wide uprising. Nor have the American abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison, bad as they were, ruined the chances for establishing the kind of Iraqi government that would count as a success for the war effort. The anger that these episodes have aroused seems to be greater in the West and in Arab countries with a vested interest in an American failure in Iraq, than among Iraqis themselves, who experienced far worse crimes during Saddam Hussein's three bloody decades in power.
On the other hand, what has happened in Iraq since Hussein was deposed scarcely guarantees that Iraqis can produce a government capable of uniting the country and governing it with at least minimal decency and competence. There has never been such a government. From the time the British created Iraq in the early 1920s, its Sunni Muslim minority ruled it harshly, at the expense of its other two major groups - the Shia Muslims, who make up roughly 60 percent of the population, and the Kurds. Whether these three groups can find a way to live peacefully within a single country is the question. At this point the answer is entirely unclear.
That answer will come not with the formal transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis on June 30, which will leave American authorities effectively in charge, but with the national elections tentatively scheduled for early next year. If the elections are reasonably free, fair and orderly, they will bestow real political legitimacy on those elected Iraqis, who will then have the task of creating a stable, effective government for the whole country. If they succeed in doing so, this would do a great deal to vindicate the investment, in blood and money, that the United States has made in Iraq.
But that success - if indeed it does occur - will come well after our election in November. By the time Iraq's political future becomes clear, President Bush's political fate will already have been decided.
Michael Mandelbaum is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor of foreign policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.