Editorial: New pitch on Iraq

Wednesday, May 9, 2007 | 7:20 a.m.

R epublicans in Congress are throwing out intimations that they may change their tune on Iraq at summer's end - just in time to have a new image for their party firmly in place by early 2008, when their own elections and the presidential race will starting getting hot.

With a new poll by Newsweek magazine showing President Bush's approval rating at 28 percent, a new low even for him, Republicans know they must distance themselves from the White House or face political annihilation at the ballot box.

It is unfortunate that it takes election worries to move Republicans away from their rote support of the White House's policy on the Iraq war. Policy, though, is too kind of a word. Bumbling bull-headedness is a more apt description. Now that Bush is lurching toward lame-duck status, it is only too predictable that support from his longtime complicitous base in Congress will begin lessening as its members attempt to separate themselves from that description.

U.S. forces in Iraq number nearly 150,000 and will number more than that when Bush's surge of 30,000 additional troops has been fully implemented. Republicans united earlier this month to sustain Bush's veto of a Democratic war-funding bill that would have seen significant force reductions by next year.

But to hear many Republicans talk now, it appears they are intending to use the surge as a handy jumping-off point, as in jumping off the Bush bandwagon.

"By the time we get to September, October, members are going to want to know how well this (the surge) is working, and if it isn't, what's Plan B?" House Republican Leader John Boehner said on "Fox News Sunday."

Three more Republicans - Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon, Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, all up for reelection - chimed in on that same theme in comments published Tuesday by The Washington Post.

Expect to see many more congressional Republicans beginning to reposition themselves on the Iraq war as the 2008 election draws closer.