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The cart of US President George W. Bush's reelection campaign has barely bumped through investigations over intelligence failure and the administration's anti-terrorism strategy before it got stuck in the mud of the scandal over abuse of Iraqi prisoners.
A growing international uproar and widely-spread domestic disgust over appalling pictures of American soldiers abusing and sexually humiliating Iraqi prisoners threaten to derail Bush's reelection effort, experts say.
Since the start of the election year, the policies, or the flaws of policies, of the Bush administration over Iraq and terrorism have gone through close public scrutiny.
The Congress investigated the intelligence failure over the claimed existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq in February. Beginning in late March, an independent panel probing the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks held a series of high-profile hearings amid charges that the Bush administration had not regarded fighting al-Qaida as an urgent priority before the terrorist network struck the United States.
Then came April, which turned out to be the bloodiest month for American troops in Iraq since the war broke out more than one year ago. American troops found themselves fighting on multiple fronts. Besides loyalists of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and combatants seemingly coming from nowhere, they also faced a somewhat surprising insurgency by Shiite Muslims loyal to the militant cleric Moqtada Sadr.
Those events have already led to the decline of public support rate for Bush. Various polls before the abuse scandal showed both Bush's approval ratings and the support for his Iraq policy dropped below 50 percent.
"The Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal erupted at a time of growing public doubts about the situation in Iraq and the president's handling of the effort to win the peace," Thomas E. Mann, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, told Xinhua.
"The scandal reinforces those public doubts and puts the president's reelection very much at risk."
Compared with intelligence failure and charges of lacking anti-terrorism strategy, the abuse scandal has more significant impact over Bush's reelection effort, experts say.
"It highlighted public concern that the United States is losing authority in the war," Anthony Corrado, professor of Government at Colby College and visiting fellow at Brookings, said in an interview.
The Bush administration first said it launched the war to address the issue of WMD. Failing to find such weapons, it claimed that it was bringing democracy to Iraq. "The abuse scandal directly challenged that argument," Corrado said.
The abuse scandal also served to verify public concern that the Bush administration was not properly prepared for what would be going on in Iraq after the war, further weakening the public support for the war, Corrado said.
At this point, most of the public criticism in response to the prisoner abuse photographs is not directed toward the president, mainly focusing on military officers in Iraq and defense officials in Washington. But Corrado said the situation might change.
"It's clear that the president did not know the full scale of the abuse. This fit in one pattern as those events such as intelligence and 9/11 investigations, showing a president did not ask hard questions. It is contributing to a perception of weak leadership," he said.
Democrats seem a bit confused by the fact that as Bush's job-approval ratings took a deep dive, and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry still lagged behind him in latest polls. Several polls showed Kerry was two or three percentage points behind Bush in a hypothetical race.
Corrado said it was mainly because at this point the public generally focus their attention on the incumbent. "Kerry is in a better competitive position at this point in the race than any other challenger to a sitting president in other elections in the last 30 years," he said.
(Xinhua News Agency May 14, 2004)
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