Outlook on Iraq puts Porter on offense and defense

By Michael Mishak

Friday, Aug. 31, 2007 | 10 p.m.

Rep. Jon Porter made his fourth trip to Iraq last week and, by his account, spent time “in the trenches” with troops and faced two mortar attacks. What he witnessed and heard from U.S. and Iraqi leaders gave him much cause for hope, he said.

The three-term Republican then returned to his Nevada district, where that very optimism about the war clouds his political future.

Porter is being squeezed by anti-war activists demanding that he vote to end the war and pro-war activists urging him to continue supporting it. Both political parties say he is among the most vulnerable members of Congress in the 2008 elections. And Democrats now outnumber Republicans in his district.

All of this adds up to the tightest spot of Porter's political career.

In an interview shortly after his long return flight, Porter made a case for a war that has become increasingly unpopular.

The good news, in his view: Car-filled streets. Open markets. People shopping. Kids playing soccer. There's even talk of a bicycle shop. “That means they're focusing more on their quality of life than just their security,” he said.

Porter said that Gen. David Petraeus, the top American military commander in Iraq, and Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, told him that President Bush's troop “surge” is working. It has given breathing room for the Iraqis to begin political reconciliation, he said.

To be sure, much remains to be done, he said, but Iraq's military and its politicians are now working in earnest.

“I sense that all three of the governing parties are receiving benefits from the oil revenues,” Porter said. “They are working together unlike they ever have in their history. I see a dysfunctional government, but I don't see a failed government. We have to make sure it succeeds because the consequences are so great.”

Withdrawing troops now, he said, would plunge the region into disaster. Porter said Petraeus and Crocker told him the possible effects of a pullout include genocide, $8 a gallon gas prices, Iranian control of Iraq and more al-Qaida training camps.

“At the end of the day, the consequences are so great that I see this as big a war as World War II,” Porter said. “Unfortunately the Democrats haven't come up with a solution other than we should leave or that we've lost. This is a war that I inherited, that Democrats and Republicans alike voted for. I'm trying to find a way to bring our troops home as quickly as possible and secure that region of the world so we can feel safe.”

He also hopes the message will help him out of his political bind.

The three-term lawmaker narrowly defeated an anti-war candidate last year, when his district was evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. Today, voter registration is tilting Democratic in his district and the national party says Porter is a major target in 2008.

To some extent, he already is.

Porter was one of 12 House Republicans targeted in a radio ad campaign last month paid for by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The ads criticized Porter for five Iraq-related votes.

Then came television ads run by anti-war activists, paid for by Americans United for Change, which has ties to the Democratic Party and organized labor. The ads link Porter to Bush and criticize the congressman for “voting time and again against bringing our troops home.”

Seeing the pressure, a group that supports the war began a television campaign urging Porter not to waver. Those ads, financed by a group named Freedom's Watch, feature maimed Iraq war veterans and family members of the war dead who urge viewers to insist that members of Congress stand firm.

Among the group's supporters are prominent Republicans such as former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson.

Porter said he is not feeling any pressure. “The Democratic Party is spending millions of dollars in Nevada in a charade of trying to use the war as a way to win an election,” he said.

Porter has been working campaign donors vigorously to rebuild a bank account nearly emptied in 2006. Helped by Republican leaders and by his new seat on the influential House Ways and Means Committee, he raised more than $695,000 in the first six months of the year, making him one of his party's top incumbent fundraisers.

The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan political newsletter in Washington, has identified Porter as one of 15 House Republicans facing a competitive race next year.

“This is a classic case of a Republican who has served for several terms, who finds himself in the most political trouble yet,” said David Wasserman, a Cook analyst who studies House races. “He's been an aggressive fundraiser through and through. His problem is his district.”

A battleground since it was drawn after the 2000 Census, Nevada's 3rd Congressional District now leans Democratic by about 4,000 voters, a 1 percent registration edge that will widen if trends continue.

Asked about the frequent anti-war protests held outside his Henderson office, Porter said they were nothing more than political theater.

A meeting at the Painters Union hall in Henderson this week organized by Americans Against Escalation in Iraq, a coalition of groups, such as MoveOn.org and the Service Employees International Union, attracted about 75 anti-war constituents. They had hoped to engage Porter.

Porter was on his way back from Iraq at the time. But he said in an interview later that he would have skipped the event if he had been here because he did not regard it as a legitimate expression of his constituents' feelings. Immigration, he said, is their bigger concern.

“The whole forum was funded and set up by the Democratic Party,” Porter said. “If you spend millions of dollars you're going to get lots of people to show up. I just wish the activists would be honest about it. They're being disingenuous.”

The anti-war meeting drew religious leaders, Vietnam veterans and families of troops now in Iraq.

April Medlin, a 24-year Henderson resident whose brother just returned from Iraq, asked for Porter to help end the war. Jerry Osborn, whose stepson is on his third tour in Iraq, said he saw echoes of Vietnam. And Fred Keiserman, a 20-year resident and registered Republican, ignored Porter's record on the issue and instead criticized the “spineless” Democratic majority for its failure to do more to bring troops home.

Porter said most people who talk to him about the war want the American troops to come home -- but not without victory.

Porter has said he bases his decisions about the war on information gleaned from his visits to Iraq -- a one-on-one visit with a Nevada Guardsman, lunch with an Iraqi soldier, meetings with officials.

Where Porter saw progress and cause for hope on the recent trip, however, another lawmaker on the trip saw something different.

Rep. Ellen Tauscher, a California Democrat who led the congressional delegation, wrote about the trip in an online diary. Tauscher said the trip showed her the “paralytic Maliki government's inability to move forward on a ‘political surge.'”

Tauscher also said she saw little justification for sustaining the military surge. “I'm no doctor but I think I have diagnosed a virulent and dangerous new disease -- Green Zone Fog,” Tauscher wrote.

“It is a dangerous group-think phenomenon that ill serves American security policy by disavowing the damaging past mistakes and erroneous assumptions and simultaneously arming the Iraqis with talking points that are also blissfully without any accountability for the litany of tragic errors both parties have made over the last five years.”

New details of Porter's Iraq trip came to light Friday when The Washington Post reported that the individuals with whom the group interacted -- Iraqi officials, U.S. officials and uniformed military -- had been prepped for their visit by a document that included thumbnail biographies of the three lawmakers, selected quotes and selected votes on Iraq.

For Tauscher and the third member of the delegation, Virginia Democrat James Moran, the news further tainted the legitimacy of all congressional trips to Iraq. Tauscher told the Post she had been “slimed in the Green Zone,” and Moran called it “spin city.”

Porter told the newspaper that he avoided the spin. “No doubt you will have people speak the company talking points,” he said. “But I spent time with people who were not officers, four of them from Nevada, two who were very blunt” in their support of the war and their ire over Washington partisanship, he told the Post.

Congress reconvenes Tuesday after its August recess. The war debate is expected to reach a new pitch the following week as Petraeus and Crocker offer their assessment.

“I think there's a lot of pressure right now,” Porter said. “The Iraqis know they have to continue to foster better relations. They're acutely aware that the clock is running and we want to get our troops home. I suspect we'll be seeing that after the first of the year anyway.”

Michael J. Mishak can be reached at 259-2347 or at [email protected].