Unquestionably, in hindsight we made a mistake by not retaining Saddam’s old army minus the commanders. This is the approach some of the countries in Eastern Europe, such as the Czech Republic and Hungary, took when the Communists were forced to yield power. The old communist army changed uniforms and continued with business as usual.

All of this news was sufficiently disturbing, but there are two other items which were even more troublesome. The first is a nationwide Washington Post-ABC news poll which showed that President Bush has lost considerable public support for the war and no longer has the backing of a majority of the American people. Specifically, nearly three quarters of Americans believe the number of causalities in Iraq is unacceptable, and sixty percent believe the war was not worth fighting.

These results are markedly worse for the President than those in previous polls. It’s easy to dismiss a poll like this and say that the American people don’t run the war. But they do because Americans vote in national elections every two years. So the President has to be sensitive to public opinion.

The second is that the Army reported that it has fallen short of its recruitment goals for the fourth consecutive month. And the Marines missed their goals four out of the five months this year. All of this occurred despite an enormous recruitment effort with a hard sell for high school kids and others who would have been rejected three years ago.

If we can’t recruit, we don’t have an army. Forget the idea of a draft. It’s almost certain to be a nonstarter even with the Republican dominated congress. A few years ago we watched with glee as the Russian war in Afghanistan destroyed the Russian army. Hopefully, we won’t go the same way in Iraq.

The recruitment results and the national poll have an obvious link. Their common message is that the President is losing the American people.

It’s not difficult to understand why this is occurring. To be sure, there is a great deal of revisionist history going on with people claiming that they never supported the war when in fact they did. But there are many others, myself included, who are willing to state that they thought the war made sense because American Middle Eastern interests would be better without Saddam Hussein, who was also a horror for his people. What we didn’t anticipate was the extent of the insurgency/civil war in Iraq. I doubt whether Bush, Cheney or Rumsfield expected it either.

The question now is how President Bush will respond to the loss of support among the American people in view of the insurgency. The President can order the military commanders to step up the war on the insurgents and even bomb targets in Syria supporting the insurgents, but that may not succeed. He can order expedited training for the Iraqi forces, but that’s already being done. He could develop an exit strategy, which calls for leaving Iraq in the next year, while declaring victory and saying the Iraqis can handle the mess we leave behind. That would not only be a fig leaf, but isn’t consistent with how Bush operates. The President sticks with the commitments he has made.

Unfortunately, Bush has no good choices. The American people, however, do have a choice in the congressional elections of 2006. The Republican Party has to be concerned. If public dissatisfaction with the war continues to grow, the election may be the vehicle for sending a powerful message to the President.

What this means is that a clock is now running on our Iraqi operation. The President is in a race to stifle the insurgency before either American support drops so low that the Republicans are defeated in the next election, or the American military grows dissatisfied with the toll Iraq is taking on our military infrastructure.

Allan Topol / AllanTopol.Com E-Mail: readermail@AllanTopol.Com