With support for the War in Iraq among the American people plummeting faster than the Cub’s chances for post season play, there’s only one person who can change the political dynamic of the situation and buck up the spirits of his supporters and once again flummox the designs of his opponents.

George Bush has been absent from the front for too long. His digressions into domestic politics have shifted his focus from Iraq with nearly disastrous consequences for our efforts there. His press conferences over the last few months have been exercises in little more than soft core salesmanship. There’s been a lack of focus from the White House resulting in the perception that our Iraq policy is adrift. Our men are dying, the terrorist insurgency is slaughtering the Iraqi people with scores dying every day. The Iraqi government is quibbling. And worst of all, because of a lack of leadership, the American people are beginning to lose heart.

Part of this loss of faith by the people is the result of the constant drumbeat of negativity from the MSM and the President’s political opponents. It’s gotten so bad that some of the less committed supporters of the President in Congress have begun to run for cover by supporting a Democratic effort to tell the enemy when we plan to stop killing them.

And it doesn’t help when the Vice President says that the insurgency is in its “last throes” only to be contradicted by the top Commander in the Persian Gulf.

All of this should be a wake-up call for the President and his advisor’s. Instead, a big PR push is planned over the next week or so culminating in what apparently is going to be a prime time address on Iraq from the Oval Office.

This is not the way to rekindle the war spirit in the American people. It is shallow. And it’s a pointless exercise in politicking when we need more, much more. It’s time to get back to work on Iraq.

It’s time to get off the stump and get back in the saddle. It’s time to face down the demons of Viet Nam that are gleefully being conjured up by your political foes and squash the idea of any kind of a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq. And it’s time to start kicking your opponents in the teeth for their obstinacy, their opposition, their obstructionism, and their ever escalating flights of rhetorical baloney comparing you, the Republican party, and anyone who supports you with Nazis.

Austin Bay has some excellent suggestions:

But our weakness is back home, in front of the TV, on the cable squawk shows, on the editorial page of the New York Times, in the political gotcha games of Washington, D.C.

It seems America wants to get on with its Electra-Glide life, that Sept. 10 sense of freedom and security, without finishing the job. The military is fighting, the Iraqi people are fighting, but where is the U.S. political class?

The Bush administration has yet to ask the American people—correction, has yet to demand of the American people—the sustained, shared sacrifice it takes to win this long, intricate war of bullets, ballots and bricks.

Bullets go bang, and even CBS understands bullets. Ballots make an impression—in terms of this war’s battlespace, the January Iraqi elections were World War II’s D-Day and Battle of the Bulge combined. But the bricks—the building of Iraq, Afghanistan and the other hard corners where this war is and will be fought—that’s a delicate and decades-long challenge.

Given the vicious enemy we face, five years, perhaps 15 years from now, occasional bullets and bombs will disrupt the political and economic building. This is the Bush administration’s biggest strategic mistake: failure to tap the American willingness produced by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

We’ve taken the President to task for this failure in the past. His inability to ask – or as Mr. Bay so rightly puts it – demand sacrifices of the American people is perhaps his biggest political error in this entire conflict. The American people have nothing invested in this war. We’re suffering a disconnect from the battlefield that was never a problem in World War II. Of course, most people at home during that war had a personal stake in the outcome what with family members in harms way. But it wasn’t just that. It was the way the war played out in the everyday lives of people. Rationing, war bonds, scrap metal drives, victory gardens, all became part of the American landscape, imprinting the war on people’s consciousness and uniting the country in such a way so that when setbacks and crisis occurred, there was a sense that we were facing our problems together.

Today, flickering images of smoldering cars, dead bodies, horribly wounded people, and grim body counts are watched in the privacy of our homes. Disconnected as we are from our neighbors and even our families, we struggle to deal with feelings of helplessness and sorrow as we watch the carnage night after night on television. It has caused many loyal and patriotic Americans to question why we’re in Iraq. What good is being done there? And most importantly, is it worth the lives of our best and brightest young people?

Only by leveling with the American people about who we’re fighting and what we’re fighting for can the dynamic be changed.

NRO’s Barbara Lerner has some suggestions:

I agree that the administration is at fault, but for an entirely different reason: because Cowboy George morphed into Cautious George. Cowboy George was a bold leader, unafraid to take the tough offensive actions we must take to win this war. He led us in the first two years after 9/11, and Americans rallied behind him in numbers so overwhelming they made “soft America” all but invisible. But after our conquest of the Iraqi military in 2003, Cautious George replaced Cowboy George. Cautious George is forcing us to fight with one hand tied behind our back by pretending we are fighting against one country only. In fact, we are fighting a regional war in Iraq, and have been since day one. It’s past time for America to acknowledge that fact and act on it. Time to make all the Middle Eastern despots who are pouring money, men, and arms into the battle in Iraq stop.

Because the president has not done this, most Americans think we are fighting only against Iraqis — local people, dependent on local resources. In that light, our inability to stem the daily toll of bombs and blood looks like evidence that most Iraqis support terror. Americans don’t see that Iraq as worth fighting for, or that kind of war as winnable. Other polls suggest Americans worry, increasingly, that Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia also threaten our security. They fear that by expending so much blood and treasure on Iraq alone, we may make ourselves more vulnerable to attacks from others.

Iraq is a difficult place, but this all-dark picture is false as well as dispiriting. Inadvertently, the Bush administration has made it look believable by downplaying the big role that foreign governments and their terrorist proxies play in Iraq. Administration spokesmen rarely pointed to the support — diplomatic as well as military — Iraq’s Sunni Baathist terrorists get from Sunni tyrants abroad, and they kept insisting that foreign jihadists are only a minority of the fighters we face. But foreign support is a fact, and harping on the relatively small number of foreign jihadists in Iraq at any one time misses the point. Foreign jihadists are responsible for almost all suicide bombings, and suicide bombings cause a disproportionate share of American and Iraqi casualties. Worse, because foreign jihadists come from all the Arab states as well as Iran, there is an endless supply of them. If we confine ourselves to hunting them down, one by one, only after they infiltrate Iraq, we will be there forever. Far better to act forcefully to stop the infiltration, and do it in a way that sends a message to all terror-succoring states: The free ride is over. The price for continuing to aid and abet the war against us and against a free Iraq has gone up.

Would this mean expanding the war? It would mean making it crystal clear to Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia that continued infiltration of bloodthirsty jihadists from their countries will carry with it a graduated series of consequences, the worst of which would be the despotic Sheiks, Mullahs, and autocrats sharing a jail cell with Saddam Hussein. If you said it, they’d believe it.

For the folks back home, we need to be reminded constantly of what our ultimate goal is in Iraq. Don’t be afraid to raise the ghosts of 9/11 to justify your policy. First of all, it would drive your opponents crazy and make them say things that would have them looking like apologists for the terrorists. And it would also bring into stark relief the unthinkable alternative of getting out of Iraq before the job was done.

It’s time to step up and get out front of this issue before your opponents preempt your policy and start substituting their own agenda. That can’t happen. If it does, yours will have been a failed presidency. And you’ll only have yourself to blame.

Cross Posted at Blogger News Network