President Bush became president in 2001, pledging to "restore" morality and integrity of the White House after the Clinton era. Now it looks like the integrity of the White House itself is in the mud as it sweats over the verdict in the CIA identity leak inquiry.

On October 28, the Chief of Staff to the Vice President, Lewis Libby was indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice. Investigation has been going on by the independent no-nonsense prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald against Karl Rove, a very close aide of the President at the White House, always seen together publicly. Some say the sword is hanging over the White House for at least six months, if not more.

On October 27, the President's embattled nominee to the Supreme Court, Harriet Miers, pulls out as she does not wish to "burden" the White House during the Congressional hearing for her confirmation.

On October 25, the US death toll in Iraq hit 2,000, a fresh reminder of the President's push to war over weapons of mass destruction that were never found. At the time of writing, the death toll had hit 2,007 and is rising every day.

Deaths in Iraq are coming quicker. It took 18 months for insurgents to kill 1,000 US forces, and now it took only 14 months to kill the second 1,000. 90 per cent of the US deaths have occurred since President Bush stood in May 2003 before a banner that read

"Mission Accomplished" and said major combat operations had ended in Iraq.

Protests against the war have been growing with Cindy Sheehan, mother of a dead US soldier, leading the protest. She has become the face of anti-Iraq protest. She courted arrest protesting in front of the White House.

Furthermore, the President has been facing a host of political challenges, including the corruption and conspiracy charges against the Republican House Majority leader Tom Delay, a Texan and a close ally of the President, and the investigation over insider share trading, against the Senate Republican leader Bill Frist.

Presidential coterie
President Bush was a governor of Texas, hardly had any foreign policy experience, and visited overseas rarely. He selected or appointed people who were known to be experts on national security and foreign policy. However they have a flawed understanding of military power in dominating global processes in an increasingly multilateral world.

During the first term of his presidency, President Bush allowed himself to be guided by decisions on the nation's security by this very small group of neo-conservatives which included Vice President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his former deputy Paul Wolfowitz, and former National Security Adviser Dr. Condoleezza Rice.

The former US Secretary of State Colin Powell was simply steam-rolled. He did not get the ear of the President.

Political observers say the secret process of decision-making on crucial national security matters by a few substituted for the traditional National Security Council process. Such departures in the past led into a host of disasters, including the last years of the Vietnam War, the national embarrassment of Watergate, and the Iran-Contra scandal. And now the failed policy on Iraq appears to be due to the secret process of decision-making.

As the buck stops at the desk of President Bush, he cannot get away from this poor process of decision-making process. The President apparently did not listen to people who had professional experience, for example, the views of the White House anti-terrorism expert, Richard Clarke, were either totally discounted or ignored, as recounted in his book, Against All Enemies.

Approval rating down
The latest Harris poll in the Wall Street Journal shows that for the first time most Americans, 53 per cent, believe military action in Iraq was wrong. Some 66 per cent say Bush is doing a "poor job or only a fair job" on Iraq. In the context of sliding general approval ratings -- at the 38 per cent mark, according to the latest polls.

The Vice-President speaks only to the radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh and before military forces. The Defence Secretary Rumsfeld presides over the death of 2,000 US forces and another 15,000 wounded.

Insurgency surviving
The British press in October revealed that an opinion poll, commissioned secretly by the British military, found that 45 per cent of Iraqis believe attacks on foreign troops are justified.

More than 80 per cent across the country indicated strong opposition to the presence of foreign troops, and while 70 per cent said that they had no confidence in them, 67 per cent said the presence of foreign troops made them less secure, and 43 per cent considered peace and stability had deteriorated.

There is a view that such effective and widespread insurgency cannot survive for more than two and half years without the active cooperation and assistance of locals.

The British journalist Rory Carroll's account of his brief abduction in Baghdad in October provides a glimpse how unpopular the foreign forces are among Iraqis. He was put under the staircase in an ordinary Iraqi home where women went about their daily chores and children squealed with delight when he was brought out to eat and exercise.

Furthermore, whole families and wider circles of friends and acquaintances are reportedly in on the movement of thousands of rank-and-file insurgents, offering shelter, sympathy, and signals on what the Americans are up to. It is not the non-Iraqis who constitute the bulk of insurgents. It is the disaffected Iraqis themselves who carry out the insurgency against the foreign forces and the Iraqis who support the US.

Despite all Washington's promises of reconstruction, the Americans have failed to win the hearts and minds of most Iraqis and that is the big problem.

Exit strategy
There is a widespread agreement -- even from leading foreign policy realists like Brent Scowcroft, the National Security Adviser in the administration of Bush's father, who in the New York Times, in the last week of October launched an attack on Bush's foreign policy -- that the US cannot withdraw from Iraq in the foreseeable future.

Dr. Rice, who without any fanfare has taken control of the administration's Iraq policy, has reportedly said: "We will embed our diplomats, police trainers and aid workers more fully and we will deploy key construction teams across the country. These teams will help set up courts, provide essential services, and train local police forces."

The question is whether the Iraqi elections in December will draw disaffected Sunnis into political process and so diminish insurgency. Thereafter, the US troops may withdraw by stages from specific areas.

Kerry's proposed exit strategy
John Kerry, the defeated Democratic presidential candidate, in an address to Georgetown University in Washington, delivered the plain and simple exit strategy. Kerry called for withdrawing 20,000 troops from Iraq by the year-end and most forces within another year.

He called Iraq "one of the greatest foreign policy misadventures of all time. It is time for those of us who believe in a better course to say so plainly and unequivocally. I doubt there are many members of Congress who would give them the authority they abused so badly. I know I would not."

Some observers say that John Kerry is 51 weeks late in declaring his exit policy. During the campaign in 2004, he vacillated in giving a definitive policy on withdrawal of troops from Iraq.

Conclusion
The endorsement of a new Iraqi constitution is one of the few pieces of good news the US President has had this last month. On Iraq, he has given a series of speeches defending his war policies.

The mantle of leadership comes at a price -- the courage to listen to dissenting opinions and change, and to show how values stand for all time. It requires leaders to analyse, compare alternatives in terms of costs and effectiveness, and then to decide.

As French philosopher and the father of modern sociology, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) once said: "The world, including the political world, proceeds according to regular laws, and to understand any part of it, one must learn how it relates to the rest, according to those laws."

Barrister Harun ur Rashid is a former Bangladesh Ambassador to the UN, Geneva.