U.S. presidential campaign trail polarized on Iraq

By Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush's plan to keep most troops in Iraq has further polarized the U.S. presidential campaign, with Democrats declaring the policy has failed and Republicans saying the strategy is working.

Bush's decision to withdraw about 20,000 U.S. troops by next summer if conditions warrant would make only a small dent in the current 169,000 troops in Iraq by the time the U.S. presidential campaign is heating up -- an outcome political strategists said would favor Democrats unless there are dramatic improvements in Iraq.

It also means that the future of U.S. involvement in Iraq, and how long to keep thousands of troops in the country, will be -- as Bush acknowledged on Thursday -- left to the next president, raising the stakes on the campaign trail.

Bush declared in his prime-time televised speech on Thursday that "the way forward I have described tonight makes it possible, for the first time in years, for people who have been on opposite sides of this difficult debate to come together."

But there was no sign of that happening any time soon.

Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, a leading anti-war Democratic candidate, took the unusual step of buying time on MSNBC to respond to the president's speech.

"Unfortunately, the president is pressing on with the only strategy he's ever had -- more time, more troops and more war," Edwards said.

On the other side, Republican candidate Fred Thompson, a former Tennessee senator, called the limited troop drawdown "the right course," a result of "the success being seen on the ground in Iraq."

MIXED RESULTS

A report this week by the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, that declared mixed results from Bush's troop increase -- progress on the military side but little on political reconciliation -- has given both sides ammunition.

Larry Sabato, a political expert at the University of Virginia, said the Iraq debate has left Americans with "this incredibly polarized view of the war, which is not helpful when generals like Petraeus are trying to prosecute a war."

"As we learned in Vietnam, when a war becomes partisan and political it's just a question of how badly it ends," he said.

The Petraeus report and Bush's speech came as Democrats, playing to their base of support on the left, debated among themselves how quickly to get out of Iraq.

Democratic candidate Barack Obama, an Illinois senator, this week called for withdrawing one or two U.S. brigades from Iraq each month until the end of 2008.

New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, the leading Democratic candidate, said that if elected one of her first acts would be to order the Pentagon to draw up a plan to begin bringing troops home within 60 days.