White House officials fear that the last pillars of political support among Senate Republicans for President Bush's Iraq strategy are collapsing around them, according to several administration officials and outsiders they are consulting. They say that inside the administration, debate is intensifying over whether Bush should try to prevent more defections by announcing his intention to begin a gradual withdrawal of American troops from the high-casualty neighborhoods of Baghdad and elsewhere.
Bush and his aides once thought they could wait to begin those discussions until after Sept. 15, when the top field commander and the new American ambassador to Baghdad are scheduled to report on the effectiveness of the troop increase that the president announced in January. But suddenly, some of Bush's aides acknowledge, it appears that forces are combining against him just as the Senate prepares to begin what promises to be a contentious debate on the war's future and funding.
Four more Republican senators have recently declared that they can no longer support Bush's strategy, including senior lawmakers who until now had expressed their doubts only privately. As a result, some aides are now telling Bush that if he wants to forestall more defections, it would be wiser to announce plans for a far more narrowly defined mission for American troops that would allow for a staged pullback, a strategy that he rejected in December as a prescription for defeat when it was proposed by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.
"When you count up the votes that we've lost and the votes we're likely to lose over the next few weeks, it looks pretty grim," said one senior official, who, like others involved in the discussions, would not speak on the record about internal White House deliberations.
That conclusion was echoed in interviews over the past few days by administration officials in the Pentagon, State Department and White House, as well as outsiders who have been consulted about what the administration should do next. "Sept. 15 now looks like an end point for the debate, not a starting point," the official said. "Lots of people are concluding that the president has got to get out ahead of this train."
The discussions became particularly intense late last week in sessions that included Bush's national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, and his political operatives, including Karl Rove, his longtime strategist.
Officials describe the meetings as more of a running discussion than an argument. They say that no one is clinging to a stay-the-course position but that instead aides are trying to game out what might happen if the president became more specific about the start and the shape of what the White House is calling a "post-surge redeployment."
The views of many of the participants in that discussion were unclear, and the officials interviewed could not provide any insight into what Vice President Dick Cheney has been telling Bush.
Hadley was deeply concerned that the loss of Republicans could accelerate this week, a fear shared by Rove. But they also said that Rove has warned that if Bush goes too far in announcing a redeployment, the result could include a further cascade of defections -- and the passage of legislation that would force a withdrawal by a specific date, a step Bush has always said he would oppose.