On Wednesday, White House press secretary Scott McClellan attributed the problems encountered by Bolton to “ugly” tactics by Democrats, whom he accused of “playing politics” on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a charge he repeated in his usual robotic style when reporters questioned his false narrative. “The accusations that are being made [against Bolton] are unsubstantiated,” he insisted at the White House press briefing. “Again, Democrats continue to raise them.” Then on Thursday morning, the president echoed his spokesman’s complaint, demanding that the Senate “put aside politics and confirm John Bolton to the United Nations.”

If Bolton’s prospects have been dimmed by “politics,” however, the troubles appear to reflect a growing division within the president’s own party. While Bush may not read newspapers, he must be aware that dissident Republicans, not Democrats, were responsible for the dramatic postponement of a confirmation vote in the Foreign Relations Committee. Reflecting their Senate majority, Republicans enjoy a two-vote advantage over Democrats on the committee, which naturally ensures a favorable vote for any Bush nominee only if the majority remains united.

That was why the Washington press corps had predicted so confidently that the White House and the Senate leadership would ram through the Bolton nomination, regardless of the testimony against him and the mounting concern about his unfitness for the U.N. post. What stopped him was the looming defection of at least one — and possibly two or even three — of the committee’s 10 Republicans. A sudden threat to vote no by George Voinovich, R-Ohio, prompted committee chairman Richard Lugar, R-Ind., to put off the vote for three weeks pending “further investigation.” Meanwhile, Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., and the Hamlet-like Lincoln Chafee, R-R.I., each took another step back from their already hesitant support for Bolton. Although Democratic resistance and savvy maneuvering set the stage for that dramatic moment, the key actors belonged to the ruling party.

Everyone paying attention noticed all that, of course. But what appeared to be an abrupt repositioning by a few moderate Republicans actually reflected broader and deeper discomfort with this nominee.

Among the earliest strikes against the Bolton nomination, for example, was the little-noticed broadside delivered by Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., a tough old conservative who rarely disagrees publicly with the president. Domenici is an expert on nuclear proliferation, which happens to be Bolton’s primary responsibility in his current State Department post. After observing Bolton for the past three years, Domenici has judged him harshly for failing to complete negotiations with Russia over disposal of tons of extremely dangerous weapons-grade plutonium. He first noted Bolton’s incompetence during hearings last June. “Mr. John Bolton, who has been assigned to negotiate this, has a very heavy responsibility,” he said. “I hate to say that I am not sure to this point that he’s up to it.”

In early March, Domenici told the Albuquerque Journal, his hometown paper, that he was “lukewarm” about the Bolton nomination.

So was Bolton’s former boss Colin Powell, who pointedly declined to endorse a letter of support that bore the signatures of five earlier Republican secretaries of state. So were various high-profile Republican diplomats and flag officers, notably including former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and former National Security Advisor and retired Gen. Brent Scowcroft, who have quietly made known their disdain. So was conservative intelligence analyst and lifelong Republican Carl Ford, who testified with eloquent anger about Bolton’s vengeful behavior toward subordinates who displeased or disagreed with him.

What Steven Clemons of the online Washington Note describes as “serial abuse” of his State Department colleagues is certainly not Bolton’s only disturbing characteristic. Rudeness and tactlessness aren’t exactly strong qualifications for a diplomat, but they would not be enough to forfeit support among Senate Republicans. Bolton’s opponents in both parties are more concerned about his alleged distortion of intelligence material to serve his ideological agenda; his attempts to secure top-secret National Security Agency communications intercepts for an unknown purpose; and the unsettling likelihood that when all the facts finally emerge, he will prove to have been untruthful in his Senate testimony about some of those incidents.

“Politics” may actually be driving the Republicans who oppose Bolton, both within and outside the Senate. Their reasons to reject him might be idealistic, pragmatic or even opportunistic. In every case, however, they no longer feel automatically obliged to swallow whatever the White House is serving. And their independence can only be encouraged by Bush’s declining public approval ratings, currently languishing well below 50 percent, with a substantial majority of citizens worried about the country’s direction.

From the beginning, the president’s advisors have pretended not to see or hear dissident Republicans. That insulting arrogance, which mirrors Bolton’s own behavior, may well be the ultimate mistake in this misbegotten episode.

Warner, not usually the most reckless or outspoken member of his party, was not alone in his outrage. “No member of the Senate had any clue” about the Abu Ghraib outrages, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told the New York Times. “This is entirely unacceptable. I think it is a total washout.”

The Abu Ghraib revelations unleashed a pent-up tidal wave of resentment at the cavalier way that Bush and co. have kept congressional leaders in the dark over crucial and highly charged issues, one after another. Lawmakers are appalled that Rumsfeld sat on a detailed report from Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba about the Abu Ghraib situation for weeks and that they had to learn so much from, of all places, the Web site of the one information source that good Republican conservatives despise even more than the New York Times — National Public Radio. Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was furious that his committee had been kept in the dark too. “That’s unacceptable,” he told reporters on May 5.

Even Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi, the former Senate Republican leader, told the New York Times, “I don’t feel good at all about what I’m finding out about who didn’t know what.” Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the avatar of Reagan Republicanism over the past quarter century, was the most outraged and plain-spoken of the lot: “It’s abysmal; it’s criminal,” he said. And if, or rather when, the allegations are proved true, “somebody needs to go to jail,” he added.

The revelations of repeated torture and extraordinary humiliation of Arab prisoners in Iraq have obviously appalled lawmakers, Republican and Democrat alike. But there is a lot more to it than that. For the first time in this administration, Republican Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska no longer look like an incorrigibly romantic idealist (Hagel) or an embittered, jealous presidential wannabe (McCain), both with Vietnam on the brain. Suddenly they look like prescient leaders of their party and the good consciences of the Senate.

How badly has this continuing scandal hurt the president’s clout on Capitol Hill? Far more than he, his staff or even Republican lawmakers themselves yet realize.

Unease, a smoldering anger and even fear at being cut out of the loop by Rumsfeld and his Pentagon have been building for months on Capitol Hill, especially in the Senate. Powerful mainstream senators like Warner, Lugar and Roberts are now saying in public things that would have gotten them in boiling hot water only a few weeks ago. These men will still not go as far as McCain or Hagel in blasting administration policy or Rumsfeld forthrightly. But they have come a long way already, baby. Rumsfeld is without a doubt on the skids with them. And the president’s evident determination to hang on to “his” Rummy through thick and thin is going to strain relations even more.

The White House and the Pentagon have systematically shut the Senate out of the consultative process on Iraq in a way not seen since World War I. The horrific pictures coming out of Abu Ghraib therefore did not hit a political vacuum or a strong buffer of support for the president and his defense secretary. Instead, they have served, some Senate GOP staffers privately say, to focus and harden fears and resentments that have been building for months.

The House is a tougher nut to crack. Historically, House members usually do not concern themselves with many foreign affairs issues — with the exception of hot-button ones of particular interest to influential lobbies or groups in their own districts. Also, the GOP majority of recent years under the leadership of Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas has been especially uniform in its views and in harmony with Bush on them. So far, no one there has broken ranks, and there have not been any independent, grim and public expressions of concern from House Republican leaders comparable to what has already been uttered by their Senate counterparts.

But talk to some House staffers who are privy to the thoughts and concerns of their congressmen and sometimes surprising expressions of anger and frustration come forth.

These so far fall into two categories: The first is that the czar, in this case the president, is still wise and good and just, and that it is his pesky advisors who are to blame. A remarkable amount of anger appears to be spreading in GOP House staff circles against Rumsfeld and the supposedly brilliant group of neoconservative intellectuals around him, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith — those who pushed the conquest and occupation of Iraq so remorselessly yet now appear to have not the slightest clue what to do next.

The second reaction is found less commonly among House staffers but is even more remarkable. That is the expressed belief of Republican conservatives that to retain the power that really matters (their majority in the House, with continuing control over its committees and fiscal powers), they may have to sacrifice the power that they regard as more superficial and transient: Bush’s holding on to the White House.

According to this line of thought (and I have been unable to ascertain from staffers how many Republican congressmen hold such a view), Bush, Rumsfeld and their hawks have already made such a mess out of Iraq that the next president, be it Bush or John Kerry, is certain to be on a hiding to nothing as he struggles with the war’s consequences next year. Indeed, it is inevitable that there will be a massive popular backlash against the sitting president, Republican or Democrat, come the midterm elections of 2006. Far better, therefore, that Kerry win in November and still be hemmed in on the domestic front by a Republican House majority that is then free of the albatross of Iraq. If Bush wins in November, according to this belief, there is a very real danger that after 12 years the GOP will lose the jewel in its crown — control of the House — in 2006.

For the moment, however, members of the House are silent. GOP leaders are keeping their heads down, hoping the whole mess will go away in the next news cycle. Whatever the unease and resentment building against Bush there, he still has several months to rally the faithful, jut his jaw and look manly. House members will not distance themselves from a president who shares their core beliefs before the fall and, even then, only if come September he is looking like as much a lost cause as his father did by that time in his unsuccessful reelection campaign against Bill Clinton in 1992.

In the Senate, Bush’s problems are far more immediate: If the Abu Ghraib scandal continues to metastasize, as it shows every likelihood of doing, then the biggest pressures Bush will face to drop his beloved Rumsfeld will come not from the big, bad media so many Republican true believers still believe to be liberal, or the supposedly wimpy Democrats on the Hill, but from the leaders of the Republican Senate majority themselves. Majority Leader Bill Frist, of course, is a Bush loyalist and totally onboard with the White House. But the Tennessee doctor has been strikingly out of step with his own committee chairmen of Foreign Relations, Intelligence and Armed Services on the issue.

The danger is real enough for Bush, staffers for mainstream Republican senators say, that the two hard-charging mavericks, Hagel and McCain, may set their party’s tone, or even agenda, on dealing with Rumsfeld. Other Republican senators are already so disgusted with Rumsfeld’s bungles that they at the very best will not publicly defend him. The 92-to-nothing bipartisan resolution passed on Monday condemning the Abu Ghraib abuses signals that the turning point is very close, and may already have been reached. GOP Senate leaders showed none of the usual efforts to delay or water down a resolution that, after all, was highly damning to the administration run by their own party.

If there was a single moment when congressional Republicans’ doubts about Iraq germinated and started to bloom, it was when Bush was forced to unleash his $87 billion request for rebuilding Iraq last August. As luck would have it, the request came out just as Islamic guerrillas in Iraq assassinated Shiite Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, United Nations special envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and several hundred of their officials, supporters and other victims in a blitz of bombings.

Successful politicians, especially in a system like that of the United States — where every congressional seat is up for grabs, at least theoretically, every two years — cannot afford the luxury of the neocon fantasy of bringing American-style democracy to Iraq. They keep their seats for a lot longer than two years by delivering the bacon and the pork for their constituents and by being plugged in to what the folks back home are thinking. And the remorseless rise in body bags coming home from Vietnam — sorry, Iraq — combined with the unyielding refusal of the reviving economy to generate well-paying new jobs, alarms them. Even the growing casualties and death toll did not seem to matter so long as the people running things in the Pentagon and the White House still looked as if they knew what they were doing.

But that is no longer the case. Bush remains convinced that Rumsfeld is a genius. Almost no one in the Senate majority, apart from Frist and a couple of other true believers, agrees anymore. Even in the House, the murmurings of staff members have grown into a chorus of cicadas.

Many congressional leaders had circulated with Rumsfeld on May 1 at the annual White House Press Correspondents dinner as the Abu Ghraib story was breaking, and the carefree way he and Wolfowitz enjoyed themselves that evening is now also reverberating on Capitol Hill. What for so long seemed the secretary’s greatest asset — his blasé coolness and imperturbability through every crisis — is being widely reinterpreted as arrogant and even reckless delusion.

Yet as Bush made clear in his visit to the Pentagon Monday morning, he remains determined to keep Rummy on — a determination that should be taken literally. For this president is, to quote the one book he appears to ever seriously consult, “an Israelite without guile.” He could not bring himself to acknowledge a single personal mistake or error of judgment when pressed four times in his press conference last month. Nor could he bring himself to personally apologize to the Iraqi people for the torture and abuse revelations when he went on Arab television, supposedly with the express purpose of doing so. All this pales compared with the magnitude of error and miscalculation he would have to admit, however tacitly, if he dropped Rumsfeld now.

By keeping Rummy, Wolfie, Dougie and the gang on, the new gap between Bush and seasoned Senate loyalists like Hatch and Lott could grow into a Grand Canyon. Bush probably imagines that his House majority is made of sterner stuff, but by no means all of them are. The House is far more responsible to public opinion than the Senate is, and historically, in times of crisis, congressmen tend to defer to outspoken senators on issues of national security and foreign affairs — as presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson have discovered to their cost.

If it were not for the steady stream of catastrophes followed by bombshells erupting from Iraq, Bush would be looking good. Kerry’s performance so far has been lackluster, and the Bush-Cheney campaign’s $60 million ad blitz in early spring drove up Kerry’s negatives to satisfyingly high numbers. Even the flat jobs growth rate — boosted only by part-time jobs devoid of health benefits — could be massaged into a feel-good numbness.

But Iraq will not stay quiet. It will not stop coughing up horrifying and disgusting surprises. Bush and Rumsfeld appear to be genuinely unconcerned by this, but Capitol Hill Republicans clearly are coming to see it very differently. They are professional politicians who cannot afford to live in a permanent fantasy in which they imagine themselves walking in the steps of Winston Churchill.

President Clinton on Sunday modified his own Iraq policy and moved closer to a Republican-led plan. Late last week, critics like Sens. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., and Sam Brownback, R-Kan., along with former Bush administration officials like Paul Wolfowitz, had urged the Clinton administration to adopt a long-run strategy toward ousting Saddam Hussein. On Sunday Clinton said that while the United States will continue its policy of containing Saddam by working to eliminate his weapons of mass destruction, “over the long-term the best way to address that threat is through a government in Baghdad — a new government — that is committed to represent and respect its people, not repress them; that is committed to peace in the region.”

The last time any U.S. president talked like that was shortly after the Gulf War, when President George Bush called upon Iraqis to “force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside” and bring Iraq “back into the family of peace-loving nations.” Though Bush’s call quickly inspired mass insurrection in northern as well as in southern Iraq, the Bush administration merely stood by as Saddam crushed the insurrectionists with superior firepower that he had ingeniously saved from harm during the Gulf War.

“They were slaughtered,” says Wolfowitz, now the dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, who, during the Bush administration, was a senior Pentagon planner. “I got chewed out by [Gen. Colin] Powell for fighting the decision [not to back them] even after it had been made,” he adds. “It was wrong morally and we’re paying for it now.”

Clinton administration officials say they have no intention of repeating past mistakes. Instead, their policy is designed “so the next time this set of circumstances present themselves the results will be different,” says the White House official.

For nearly six years, the Clinton administration followed Bush’s lead of not getting too close to the Iraqi opposition. Last February, during the last dramatic showdown with Saddam, Clinton snubbed Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, when he came to Washington to solicit the administration’s backing on behalf of a loose coalition of opposition groups that make the INC.

Critics both within and outside the administration have long argued that the Iraqi opposition is too spent a force to play any effective role. In March, Richard N. Haass, a former Bush administration national security advisor, told the Senate Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs that the Iraqi opposition was “weak and divided.” He added: “Building a strong, united opposition is an uncertain proposition that at a minimum would take years.”

But that didn’t stop the Republican-led Congress from authorizing Clinton to provide the Iraqi opposition with $97 million in U.S. assistance. Though the president signed the bill two weeks ago, he did not encourage the legislation. “The administration has opposed any serious effort to help the Iraqi opposition in recent years,” says Zalmay Khalizad, a Rand Corporation analyst who, during the Bush administration, was also a Defense Department planner. “The question now is, does he have a plan, a strategy, a will for moving forward?”

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The Clinton administration began to rethink its Iraq policy back in February, U.S. officials say, when it became clear that Saddam’s constant thwarting of the U.N. inspection team might render it an ineffective way to curb his ability to produce weapons of mass destruction. “If it hasn’t worked for eight to 10 months,” says another White House official, “then why would it work now?” So officials at the National Security Council and the State Department began reconsidering their options. “But you only have so many tools in your toolbox,” says a State Department official.

The administration’s three main tools have been U.N. inspections to monitor Saddam’s ability to make weapons of mass destruction, unilateral bombing to enforce his compliance with the U.N. inspection team and multilateral economic and trade sanctions to maintain pressure on Saddam and his regime. Newsweek reported last week that in the face of Saddam’s constant thwarting this year of the U.N. inspections, the administration had decided that sanctions, backed up by bombing, would be the best way to contain Saddam in the long term.

“We were not getting anything with the inspections,” explains Andrew C. Winner, a former State Department political/military planner who is now with the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis. “So sanctions were seen as the best lever.”

Until Sunday, there was little indication that the administration was even considering another tool: the option of seriously backing the Iraqi opposition to eventually replace Saddam in power. Now, however, Clinton has flagged that goal as a stated objective of U.S. policy, though critics still complain that he fails to move toward it. “I see [Clinton's statement] as inching in the right direction,” says ex-Bush planner Wolfowitz. “But what I think is needed is a very clear statement that we are committed to [Saddam's] removal.”

Instead, the Clinton administration has said exactly the opposite. After Clinton stepped off the White House podium on Sunday, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and Secretary of Defense William Cohen fielded questions from the press. In response to one journalist’s query about whether the president’s unusually strong language suggested that he was seeking to oust Saddam, Cohen said: “He was not calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. What he was saying is that we are prepared and will work with opposition forces or groups to try and bring about, at some future time, a more democratic type of regime.”

Clinton administration officials deny that there is any inconsistency between longing for a new Iraqi government in the future and stopping short of calling for Saddam’s overthrow now. “We are intensifying our efforts” in the support of the opposition, says the White House official. “There will be an effort to work with them more in earnest,” he adds, choosing language that seems like an admission of the administration’s failure to earnestly support the opposition before. Earlier this year, many State Department diplomats and other U.S. officials had privately dismissed the idea of backing the Iraqi opposition because, they said, it was ineffective. This week a few of the same officials who were reached for comment declined to discuss the matter. Others failed to return a reporter’s calls.

Most of America’s allies have yet to formally respond to the president’s new words of encouragement for the Iraqi opposition. But during the standoff with Saddam last February, Saudi Arabia refused to allow American bombers to launch from its soil, fearing that the attacks might be perceived as taking a heavier toll on Iraq’s civilians than its leaders. Now Arab diplomats say they are cautious about the administration’s plan to back the Iraqi opposition.

Many of the front-line states around Iraq, like Saudi Arabia and Turkey, have long opposed any plan for Iraq that could potentially divide the country. U.S. officials have also long feared the same result. Though about one in five Iraqis are Sunni Arabs like Saddam Hussein, three out of five Iraqis are Shia Arabs who share their religion with the vast majority of Persian people along with the government in neighboring Iran. Nearly one more out of five Iraqis are Sunni Kurds who, to some degree, share an ethnic identity with Kurds in Turkey, Syria and Iran. Says one Arab diplomat, “We [have long] opposed any plan that could lead to the break-up of Iraq.”

The Clinton administration now seeks to bring America’s regional allies on board with the opposition. “We know we don’t have it yet,” says the White House official. “But we want to work with a broad range of [Iraqi] groups and build a base of support for them with countries in the region.” But first the administration must convince its Arab allies, along with others, that the Iraqi opposition could be resurrected into a viable force. “After years of repression by Saddam Hussein, there is no recognizable Iraqi opposition out there yet,” says the Arab official.

There was once. Back after the Gulf War, on March 1, 1991, the very day that Bush made his call for Iraqis to overthrow Saddam, Shia clerics in southern Iraq called for insurrection, and within days, rebel forces had taken the Iraqi town of Basra near the Saudi border, while fighting had broken out as well in nearly every city in southern Iraq. On March 14, Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq followed suit by launching their own offensive. In less than a week, they liberated every town with a Kurdish-speaking population in northern Iraq. Journalists in northern Iraq at the time interviewed Iraqi army prisoners-of-war who expressed only contempt for Saddam, and they saw Kurds holding hands and singing and dancing in the streets.

This was the moment that the Bush administration chose to ignore. “We should have at least taken out [Saddam's] gunships,” says Wolfowitz, adding that without the protection of helicopters his tanks would have found it riskier to advance. Instead, Bush officials did nothing as first Shia rebels in the south and then Kurdish guerrillas in the north were decimated. In As-Samawah in southern Iraq, fleeing witnesses reported that Iraqi troops shot Shia men on sight as they advanced behind a shield of captured Shia women. Outside Kirkuk in northern Iraq, journalists saw Iraqi forces drop a blanket of fire on fleeing guerrillas and civilians. Tanks only overran Kirkuk after multiple rocket launchers had softened the ground and rocket-firing gunships, along with smaller choppers, had destroyed most fixed targets.

There has been only weak and sporadic armed opposition to Saddam and his regime since. Most of it has been concentrated in northern Iraq, where the CIA, in the mid-’90s, provided at least $15 million in covert aid to the Iraqi National Congress. The INC’s main goal was to unite two feuding Kurdish factions that have long differed over clan-based identification as well as ideology. But the effort collapsed in August 1996, when one of the Kurdish leaders, Massoud Barzani, invited Saddam to join forces with him against Iraq’s other main Kurdish leader, Jalal Talabini. Saddam’s forces moved in to destroy the CIA-backed operation, reportedly killing many detainees after capture.

Baghdad is the only other place where any significant military action against the Iraqi regime has occurred since the spring of 1991. In December 1996, a group identifying itself as Al-Nahdad, or the Awakening, attacked Saddam’s eldest son, Uday, who was notorious for torturing suspected dissidents, leaving him a paraplegic. Meanwhile, in southern Iraq, though some fighting has occurred among its remote marshlands, no known urban confrontations have taken place since the 1991 revolt, known throughout Iraq as the intifada.

The impact of its demise — throughout Iraq and the region — is something that the Clinton administration now seeks to overcome. To be successful, says Wolfowitz, Clinton “would have to finish George Bush’s war.” But he and other observers doubt whether Clinton is any more committed to the task. “We would have to show people that we were serious about this, and reassure them,” says Winner of the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis. “And that is a tall order.”