WASHINGTON, Aug 11 (AFP) - Fighting in the Shiite city of Najaf is keeping Iraq on the front pages of US newspapers, to the likely discomfort of President George W. Bush whose policies there have become a key issue in his re-election bid.
Continued bloodshed more than 15 months after Bush declared major combat over has been a thorn in the president's side, with polls showing most Americans dissatisfied with his handling of the operation.
Now, after more than a month of relative quiet following the restoration of self-rule on June 28, the battle for Najaf has put Iraq back in the spotlight and analysts said this boded ill for the Republican.
"Anything about Iraq is bad news for Bush," pollster John Zogby told AFP. "Politically, the more you keep it off the radar screen the better."
Facing a tough fight from Democratic challenger John Kerry in the November election, Bush has been trying to shape the Iraqi conflict into a local struggle since the transfer of authority to the Iraqis.
"Our policy is to work with Prime Minister (Iyad) Allawi and support the Iraqis as they move toward elections," he said Monday. "Prime Minister Allawi is now in charge of the country."
Pentagon and State Department officials rarely raise Iraq unless questioned by reporters. They take pains to characterize political developments as purely Iraqi matters and bounce any military questions out to the field.
Nevertheless, the conflict continues to take a toll among US troops, with more than 60 killed in action since the handover of authority six weeks ago, bringing the total American dead in Iraq to around 930.
Efforts to shift more of the security burden to Iraqi forces are still lagging, and the US military said Wednesday it was gearing for a major assault against Shiite Muslim militiamen in Najaf after a week of fierce clashes.
"Sometime in the not-too-distant future they will hit the figure of 1,000 dead and that will be momentous," Zogby said.
The Najaf fighting has punctured a relative lull in US media coverage of Iraq that had demonstrably taken some of the edge off the issue for voters.
A Gallup poll released early month this showed that the percentage of Americans who thought the March 2003 invasion was a mistake had declined to 47 percent, from 54 percent three weeks earlier.
The state of the economy remains uppermost in the minds of the electorate, surveys show, and Zogby said his last polling figures a month ago put Iraq in fourth place behind terrorism and health care.
Bush clearly has an interest in moving his battle with Kerry onto the general issue of terrorism, where a Time magazine poll released over the weekend showed 56 percent of Americans happy with the incumbent's work.
If voters are split over who could do a better job in Iraq, the Time survey gave the president a 49-41 percent edge over the Massachusetts senator in ability to manage the war on terror.
Iraq still plays prominently in the electoral debate, but the Republicans and Democrats have taken radically difference approaches.
Bush has insisted on the moral correctness of ridding the country of Saddam Hussein, despite the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction and links to al-Qaeda terrorists he used to justify going in.
The president exulted Tuesday after Kerry, who voted in 2002 to authorise military force in Iraq, said he would have done the same even knowing what he knows today.
But Kerry has focused on the conduct of the war, accusing Bush of bulldozing into Iraq without making sufficient efforts to whip up international support or plan for the post-Saddam reconstruction phase.