MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From the studios of NPR West, this is DAY TO DAY. I'm Madeleine Brand.
ALEX CHADWICK, host:
I'm Alex Chadwick.
Coming up: in Alaska, hundreds of National Guard troops prepare for service in Iraq and Kuwait.
BRAND: With just weeks to go before the Congressional elections, many Republicans are distancing themselves from President Bush's policy in Iraq. Joining me is NPR senior Washington editor, Ron Elving.
And, Ron, just last month, the White House managed to get the people focused on the war on terrorism. What has changed?
RON ELVING: Events, Madeleine. It's really been events. Big developments in Iraq, in Korea, back here in the United States, have forced everybody to refocus since September. And just this morning, the president found it necessary to call his counterpart in Iraq, the leader there - Nouri al-Maliki - to reassure him that the United States has no plans to leave Iraq and that he's not setting any deadlines for any kind of success level to be achieved there.
But you can see why Nouri's getting nervous because there's a strong and rising undercurrent of dissent in this country, even within the Republican Party. And the idea of saying stay the course, at least through the election season -which seemed sensible and defensible not too long ago and is still working for many Republicans in safe districts - has become less sensible and therefore less defensible for many Republicans in this campaign.
BRAND: And has the nature of the Republican criticism changed?
ELVING: Yes. In the early going in Iraq, there was some criticism from people who were unhappy about some of the pre-war intelligence, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction or links to al-Qaida. And then there were a certain number of Republicans right from the beginning, John McCain among them, who said we need more troops. This is not enough troops. It was enough to knock off Saddam Hussein or to topple him. It is not enough to secure the country. So we had that kind of criticism.
But now, we're in a new ballgame. This criticism is not about mistakes from the past. It's about the mentality for going forward. The idea that we cannot adjust our policy at all and that we have to remain on an open-ended commitment policy - that's what's being criticized now.
BRAND: And we'll have a little bit more on that coming up in the program. Ron, just a couple of weeks ago, Republicans wanted to get the topic of conversation back on to Iraq. Everyone was focused on the congressional page scandal involving Republican - former Republican Congressman Mark Foley from Florida. But I guess that strategy hasn't worked so well.
ELVING: Well, you know, it was almost a joke two weeks ago to say gee, the Republicans would rather talk about Iraq because Iraq was such a dark story in on of itself. But no one's laughing at that as a joke. It's now pretty much become strategy to push aside the page scandal story and try to get back to talking about foreign policy, even if that means talking about Iraq. This is increasingly in election that's being driven by events, and not by strategy or ads or money.
And when you have people like James Baker, the former secretary of state, who is running the Iraq study group that's going to report after the election on options for U.S. policy in Iraq. When you have people like Baker out saying, well, we're going to make some recommendations and it's not going to be either immediate withdrawal or stay the course, that in a sense gives license to everyone else in the Republican Party and everyone else in the commenting world of Washington to say that we are looking at some shift in policy in the future because the current situation is not just a plucky democratic government fighting against insurgents. It's now a policy or it's now a situation where we're fighting in some kind of twilight civil war.
BRAND: Ron Elving is NPR's senior Washington editor. His column, Watching Washington, is at npr.org. Thanks, Ron.
ELVING: Thank you, Madeleine. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
