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Analysis: Iraq, Terrorism, and U.S. Politics

Council on Foreign Relations

September 6, 2006
Prepared by: CFR.org Staff

After a summer which saw sectarian fighting in Iraq significantly worsen, political factions in the United States launched their own assaults (Houston Chronicle) on each other with an eye toward November’s U.S. midterm elections. The November vote, which polls suggest give Democrats a chance to take control of one if not both chambers of Congress, is shaping up to be the first such elections in modern history to turn on issues of foreign policy (Star-Ledger), as CFR.org’s Michael Moran writes. The Washington Times observes: "With the Democratic Party leadership intent on making the Bush administration's conduct of the war in Iraq its No. 1 issue in the November elections, the White House is fighting back with a public campaign to explain the connection between Iraq and the larger war against Islamofascist terror."

Hard on the heels of the Labor Day holiday in America—the traditional kick-off point of election campaigns—President Bush scheduled a series of appearances designed to win back support for a war which, for at least a year, has been broadly unpopular among the public. In a speech Tuesday, he returned to a previous theme—the connection between the war in Iraq and the broader war against al-Qaeda—insisting that “for al-Qaeda, Iraq is not a distraction from their war on America— it is the central battlefield where the outcome of this struggle will be decided.”

Democrats, and even some Republicans who now view the Iraq War as a mistake, believe the new emphasis on this purported link is an attempt to neutralize criticism of the difficult and fraught conflict.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.