Perle, who once chaired the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and in that capacity argued that Iraq was "a very good candidate" for democracy, said bluntly that if he could turn back the clock, he would not recommend invading Iraq now.

"I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies,'" the patriarch of neoconservatives told the magazine's December issue.

He insisted he still believed Saddam Hussein had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction and there had been a threat he could transfer these weapons to terrorists.

But three and a half years and more than 2,820 killed US troops later, Perle asked a rhetorical question: "Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention?"

"Well, maybe we could have," he responded.

He went on to complain, without specifying, that decisions that should have been made in the execution of the war came either late or not at all.

"At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible," concluded the neoconservative ideologue.

Adelman, who once said that liberating Iraq would be "a cakewalk," was less contrite, arguing that policies that served as the foundation for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq were sound, but their execution was fraught with "huge mistakes."

Throwing party loyalty out the window, Adelman said that the Bush administration "turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era."

"Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional," he continued.

Frum, who helped write Bush's famous 2002 "axis of evil" speech, bemoaned what he described as "failure at the center" for the current bloodshed in Iraq.

As opposed to traditional conservatives who have always had a penchant for isolationism, neoconservatives advocate aggressive promotion of US values throughout the world. They have long showcased Iraq as a test case for their approach.

But opinion polls indicate nearly 60 percent of Americans now believe the war is was not worth fighting.

And the Rothenberg Political Report, an independent analytical firm here, predicted Friday that Republicans will most likely lose five to seven Senate seats and 34 to 40 seats in the House of Representatives when voters go to the polls on Tuesday.

When asked about the statements by fellow neoconservatives, Vice President Richard Cheney sought to sidestep the fray, saying he did not see the interviews.

"I think there is no question that it is a tough war, but it is also the right thing to do," he told ABC News Friday.

But Cheney ruled out an early pullout of US troops, insisting it was "very important that we complete the mission" in Iraq.

The message was expected to be reinforced by President Bush this weekend as he continues to campaign for Republican candidates ahead of the November 7 vote.

Meanwhile, the Military Times Media Group, a Gannett Co. subsidiary that publishes Army Times and other military-oriented periodicals, said Friday it was calling for Bush to fire Rumsfeld. An editorial due to be published Monday says active-duty military leaders are beginning to voice misgivings about the war's planning and execution and dimming prospects for success. It declares that "Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large."

The editorial concludes by saying that regardless of which party wins in next week's election, the time has come "to face the hard bruising truth: Donald Rumsfeld must go."

When asked about the Vanity Fair article and Perle's criticism, White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said, "We appreciate the Monday-morning quarterbacking, but the president has a plan to succeed in Iraq and we are going forward with it."

Other prominent conservatives criticized the administration's conduct of the war in the article, including Kenneth Adelman, who also served on the Defense Policy Board that informally advised President Bush. Adelman said he was "crushed" by the performance of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

The critiques in Vanity Fair come as growing numbers of Republicans have criticized Bush's policies on Iraq. The war, unpopular with many Americans, has become a top-tier issue in next week's congressional elections.

Perle said "you have to hold the president responsible" because he didn't recognize "disloyalty" by some in the administration. He said the White House's National Security Council, then run by now-Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, did not serve Bush properly.

A year before the war, Adelman predicted demolishing Saddam's military power and liberating Iraq would be a "cakewalk." But he told the magazine he was mistaken in his high opinion of Bush's national security .

"They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era," he said. "Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."

Eliot A. Cohen

Being neither Republican nor Democrat, and thinking the government's conduct of the Iraq war an entirely appropriate subject of political debate I do not think anyone should have kept mum in an interview of this kind until an election had passed. That said, I had assumed that the interview would not be published until January, and find the timing of this release of excerpts tendentious, to say the least.

I stand by what I said, however, which is no different from what I have said in other venues, including in articles in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal as well a in a variety of print and television interviews over several years. Indeed, insofar as I have any personal regrets as I look back on my public statements about the war, it is for not having spoken up even more often and forcefully than I already have. I believed in 2003 that the war was just and appropriate, and have been deeply distressed at its conduct. There is no public service, however, in misleading ourselves about the situation in which we find ourselves, or in softening critiques which are necessary if we are to do better in the future.

- Eliot A. Cohen is Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins SAIS.

David Frum

There has been a lot of talk this season about deceptive campaign ads, but the most dishonest document I have seen is this press release from Vanity Fair, highlighted on the Drudge Report . Headlined "Now They Tell Us," it purports to offer an "exclusive" access to "remorseful" former supporters of the Iraq war who will now "play the blame game" with "shocking frankness."

It cites not only myself as one of these remorseful supporters, but also Richard Perle, Ken Adelman, and others.

I can speak only for myself. Obviously I wish the war had gone better. It's true I fear that there is a real danger that the US will lose in Iraq. And yes I do blame a lot that has gone wrong on failures of US policy.

I have made these points literally thousands of times since 2004, beginning in An End to Evil and most recently in my 22-part commentary on Bob Woodward's State of Denial (start here and find the remainder here.) I have argued them on radio and on television and on public lectern, usually in exactly the same words that are quoted in the press release.

"[T]he insurgency has proven it can kill anyone who cooperates, and the United States and its friends have failed to prove that it can protect them."

"I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything."

And finally that the errors in Iraq are explained by "failures at the center."

Nothing exclusive there, nothing shocking, and believe me, nothing remorseful.

My most fundamental views on the war in Iraq remain as they were in 2003: The war was right, victory is essential, and defeat would be calamitous.

And that to my knowledge is the view of everybody quoted in the release and the piece: Adelman, Cohen, Ledeen, Perle, Pletka, Rubin, and all the others.

(Not that it matters, but this fight is very personal for many of those people. Cohen and Ledeen have both had children serve in Iraq, Cohen's in the Tenth Mountain Division, Ledeen's daughter in the civil administration and his elder son in the Marines. As a civilian adviser in Iraq, Rubin displayed impressive personal courage living solo for long periods of time in the Shiite zones of east Baghdad.)

Vanity Fair then set my words in its own context in its press release. They added words outside the quote marks to change the plain meaning of quotations.

When I talk in the third quotation above about failures "at the center," for example, I did not mean the president. If I had, I would have said so. At that point in the conversation, I was discussing the National Security Council, whose counter-productive interactions produced bad results.

And when I talked in the second quotation about "persuading the president," I was repeating this point, advanced here last month. In past administrations, the battle for the president's words was a battle for administration policy. But because Bush's National Security Council malfunctioned so badly, the president could say things without action following - because the mechanism for enforcing his words upon the bureaucracy had broken.

In short, Vanity Fair transformed a Washington debate over "how to correct course and win the war" to advance obsessions all their own.

How was this done?

The author of the piece touted by the press release is David Rose, a British journalist well known as a critic of the Saddam Hussein regime and supporter of the Iraq war. (See here and here for just two instances out of a lengthy bibliography.)

Rose has earned a reputation as a truth teller. The same unfortunately cannot be said for the editors and publicists at Vanity Fair. They have repackaged truths that a war-fighting country needs to hear into lies intended to achieve a shabby partisan purpose.

- David Frum is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. This originally appeared on "David Frum's Diary" on NRO.

Frank Gaffney

In the annals of political dirty tricks, last weekend's bait-and-switch caper perpetrated by Vanity Fair will probably be but a footnote. Still, the magazine deserves contempt for having made promises it had no intention of honoring, promises about facilitating a serious discussion of President Bush's efforts to fight our Islamofascist foes in Iraq and elsewhere by some of the most adamant supporters of those efforts. None of us who responded candidly on the basis of such promises to thoughtful questions posed by reporter David Rose would likely have done so had the magazine's true and nakedly partisan purpose been revealed.

Perhaps we should have known better, given Vanity Fair's generally venal character. We were encouraged to overlook that sordid record, however, on the grounds that the author would be Rose - a journalist who had earned a reputation of late for fair and honest treatment of matters such as this. It is all the more discomfiting that - in the wake of the magazine's misleading press release released last weekend which selectively quotes from an as-yet-uncompleted-and-unpublished article - Rose failed to respond honestly when asked by an NPR reporter on Sunday morning why Richard Perle, Ken Adelman, David Frum, and others had "chosen this time" to criticize President Bush and his war effort. The correct answer was we had not "chosen" this time to do so. Rather, Rose's editors had selected this juncture in the election cycle to publicize our respective views in the worst possible light. Transparently, their hope was that such a premature and selective release would further undermine at the polls both President Bush's party and a war Vanity Fair does not support.

As with others, I find myself being quoted not only out of context but making remarks that have - albeit in more fulsome ways - been said by me many times before. As with their remarks, mine have been part of the texture of the debate about Iraq for years. They do not reflect remorse about effort to help free the long-suffering people of that country, and others under Islamofascist assault, let alone a so-called "neo-culpa."

For the record, I remain convinced that the liberation of Iraq was a necessary and laudable measure to prevent a megalomaniac from handing off to terrorists weapons of mass destruction for the purpose of attacking us and our allies. Contrary to popular belief, the U.S. government has proof that Saddam Hussein had precisely such plans ready to implement. In fact, such evidence was actually documented in the Iraq Survey Group's final report released last year with much obscuring fanfare about the absence of recovered WMDs.

I am also as committed as ever to the consolidation of the fully justified liberation of Iraq. I have repeatedly urged the president, both in person and through other channels, to make use of the full panoply of economic, financial, political, and military measures - a true War Footing - necessary to achieve it. Those who would have us do otherwise are deceiving us and/or themselves. This is true whether they are a) Democratic politicians so hungry for power that they are willing to compel our defeat in Iraq, without regard for the ultimate costs to the country; or b) Republicans like former Secretary of State James Baker, who insist we must negotiate with enemies like Iran and Syria to "secure their help" in the country that they, among others, are doing so much to destabilize.

Finally, I am persuaded that President Bush wants to do the right thing, just as he says he does. What is mystifying to me and to many of my colleagues is why, then, has he repeatedly allowed subordinates who do not want him successfully to act on his principles to continue to hold senior posts, and to get away with undermining him and his policies. As I have said and written many times in recent years, such tolerance - and the incoherent thinking and irresolute behavior associated with it - confuses the American people, emboldens our enemies and alienates our friends. We hope by pointing out these shortcomings to help sensible, capable people do better, not to encourage their replacement with people who are clueless about this war and/or truly incompetent with respect to its prosecution.

I trust that these convictions, and those of others interviewed by Rose, will be accurately reflected when he finally has his full article published - hopefully, without the subterfuge and spin that characterized the publication of this press release about it.

- Frank J. Gaffney Jr. held senior positions in the Reagan Defense Department. He currently is president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington.

Michael Ledeen

My experience with Vanity Fair is even more extensive than David Frum 's, having been the subject of a 30,000 word screed that ends with the author's bland confession "there is no evidence for any of this." So I am not at all surprised to see the editors yank words from me, David, and others out of context and totally misdescribe what we think, do and feel. I do not feel "remorseful," since I had and have no involvement with our Iraq policy. I opposed the military invasion of Iraq before it took place and I advocated - as I still do - support for political revolution in Iran as the logical and necessary first step in the war against the terror masters.

Readers of NRO know well how disappointed I have been with our failure to address Iran, which was, and remains, the central issue, and it has been particularly maddening to live through extended periods when our children were in battle zones where Iranian-supported terrorists were using Iranian-made weapons against Americans, Iraqis and Afghans. I have been expressing my discontent for more than three years. So much for a change of heart dictated by developments on the ground.

So it is totally misleading for Vanity Fair to suggest that I have had second thoughts about our Iraq policy. But then one shouldn't be surprised. No one ever bothered to check any of the lies in the first screed, and obviously no fact-checker was involved in the latest "promotion." I actually wrote to David Rose, the author of the article-to-come, a person for whom I have considerable respect. He confirmed that words attributed to me in the promo had been taken out of context.

- Michael Ledeen, an NRO contributing editor, is most recently the author of The War Against the Terror Masters. He is resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute.

Richard Perle

Vanity Fair has rushed to publish a few sound bites from a lengthy discussion with David Rose. Concerned that anything I might say could be used to influence the public debate on Iraq just prior to Tuesday's election, I had been promised that my remarks would not be published before the election.

I should have known better than to trust the editors at Vanity Fair who lied to me and to others who spoke with Mr. Rose. Moreover, in condensing and characterizing my views for their own partisan political purposes, they have distorted my opinion about the situation in Iraq and what I believe to be in the best interest of our country.

I believe it would be a catastrophic mistake to leave Iraq, as some are demanding, before the Iraqis are able to defend their elected government. As I told Mr. Rose, the terrorist threat to our country, which is real, would be made much worse if we were to make an ignominious withdrawal from Iraq.

I told Mr. Rose that as a nation we had waited too long before dealing with Osama bin Laden. We could have destroyed his operation in Afghanistan before 9/11.

I believed we should not repeat that mistake with Saddam Hussein, that we could not responsibly ignore the threat that he might make weapons of mass destruction available to terrorists who would use them to kill Americans. I favored removing his regime. And despite the current difficulties, I believed, and told Mr. Rose, that "if we had left Saddam in place, and he had shared nerve gas with al Qaeda, or some other terrorist organization, how would we compare what we're experiencing now with that?"

I believe the president is now doing what he can to help the Iraqis get to the point where we can honorably leave. We are on the right path.

- Richard Perle is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He has served as chairman of the Defense Department's Defense Policy Board during this administration.

Michael Rubin

Some people interviewed for the piece are annoyed because they granted interviews on the condition that the article not appear before the election. Vanity Fair is spinning a series of long interviews detailing the introspection and debate that occurs among responsible policymakers every day into a pre-election hit job. Who doesn't constantly question and reassess? Vanity Fair's agenda was a pre-election hit job, and I guess some of us quoted are at fault for believing too much in integrity. What the article seeks to do is push square pegs into round holes. Readers will see that the content of the piece does not match the sensational headlines. Were people gathered around the author gripping about Bush? No. Were people identifying faults in the implementation? Yes. Are people sick of the autodafe whereby pundits demand "neocon" confessions to fit their own silly conspiracy theories? Yes. Have those interviewed changed their mind about the war? I have not, no matter how self-serving partisan pundits or lazy journalists want to spin it. I can't speak for others. Again, despite the punditry out there, the so-called neocons are not Borg.

Now, for my own quote: I absolutely stand by what I said. Too many people in Washington treat foreign policy as a game. Many Washington-types who speak about Iraq care not about the U.S. servicemen or about the Iraqis, but rather focus on U.S. electoral politics. I am a Republican, but whether the Republicans or Democrats are in power, Washington's word must mean something. Leadership is about responsibility, not just politics. We cannot go around the world betraying our allies - in this case Iraqis who believed in us or allied with us - just because of short-term political expediency. This is not just about Iraq: If we abandon Iraq, we will not only prove correct all of Osama Bin Laden's rhetoric about the US being a paper tiger, but we will also demonstrate - as James Baker and George H. W. Bush did in 1991 - that listening to the White House and alliance with the United States is a fool's decision. We can expect no allies anywhere, be they in Asia, Africa, or Latin America, if we continue to sacrifice principles to short-term realist calculations. It's not enough to have an attention span of two years, when the rest of the world thinks in decades if not centuries.

- Michael Rubin is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and editor of The Middle East Quarterly. He served in Iraq as a political adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority from 2003-2004. This originally appeared on NRO's The Corner.

"Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large," the advance copy said.

"His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised," the editorial continued. "And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear its brunt."

Addressing President George W. Bush, who reaffirmed his confidence in Rumsfeld just this past week, the newspaper assured him they were not trying to influence the elections.

"Regardless of which party wins November 7, the time has come, Mr. President, to face the hard bruising truth: Donald Rumsfeld must go," the article said.

There was no immediate comment from either the Pentagon on the White House about the report.

"The conventional wisdom is the U.S. mistake in Iraq was not enough troops," said Thomas Blanton, the archive's director. "But the Desert Crossing war game in 1999 suggests we would have ended up with a failed state even with 400,000 troops on the ground."

There are currently about 144,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, down from a peak of about 160,000 in January.

A spokeswoman for U.S. Central Command, which sponsored the seminar and declassified the secret report in 2004, declined to comment Saturday because she was not familiar with the documents.

The war games looked at "worst case" and "most likely" scenarios after a war that removed then-Iraqi President
Saddam Hussein from power. Some are similar to what actually occurred after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003:

- "A change in regimes does not guarantee stability," the 1999 seminar briefings said. "A number of factors including aggressive neighbors, fragmentation along religious and/or ethnic lines, and chaos created by rival forces bidding for power could adversely affect regional stability."

- "Even when civil order is restored and borders are secured, the replacement regime could be problematic - especially if perceived as weak, a puppet, or out-of-step with prevailing regional governments."

- "Iran's anti-Americanism could be enflamed by a U.S.-led intervention in Iraq," the briefings read. "The influx of U.S. and other western forces into Iraq would exacerbate worries in Tehran, as would the installation of a pro-western government in Baghdad."

- "The debate on post-Saddam Iraq also reveals the paucity of information about the potential and capabilities of the external Iraqi opposition groups. The lack of intelligence concerning their roles hampers U.S. policy development."

- "Also, some participants believe that no Arab government will welcome the kind of lengthy U.S. presence that would be required to install and sustain a democratic government."

- "A long-term, large-scale military intervention may be at odds with many coalition partners."

Some in the standing-room-only crowd wiped away tears and embraced each other as they heard Haggard's words read by a member of the board that fired him a day earlier.

"The fact is I am guilty of sexual immorality. And I take responsibility for the entire problem," Haggard wrote. "I am a deceiver and a liar. There's a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring against it for all of my adult life."

After services, Patty Erwin kneeled near the back of the 8,000-seat auditorium and said a prayer for Haggard.

"We all love him because he's a part of our family. You don't just throw away a sister or a brother," said Erwin, who's been coming to the church for 15 years. "Desperately, we love him, and we wouldn't be here if we didn't."

Haggard, 50, resigned last week as president of the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents 30 million evangelical Christians, after a man claimed to have had drug-fueled trysts with him.

He also placed himself on administrative leave from New Life, which he founded in the 1980s. Its independent Overseer Board fired him Saturday.

In his letter, Haggard said "the accusations that have been leveled against me are not all true, but enough of them are true that I have been appropriately and lovingly removed from the ministry."

He did not specify which accusations were true. Haggard had acknowledged Friday that he paid Mike Jones of Denver for a massage and for methamphetamine, but said he did not have sex with him and did not take the drug.

The letter was read to the church by the Rev. Larry Stockstill, senior pastor of Bethany World Prayer Center in Baker, La., and a member of the board that fired him. Haggard asked for forgiveness for himself and for his accuser.

In a separate letter, Haggard's wife prompted laughter when she promised to remain with her husband and said church members no longer had to worry about her marriage being so perfect she couldn't relate to them.

Neither Haggard nor his wife, Gayle, attended.

Youngsters were sent from the room before elders began discussing the church crisis.

"Worshippers are always challenged by crisis. And when tragedy and crisis strikes it is at that moment that you truly decide if you are a worshipper of the most high God. And today as the worship pastor of this church I am very proud of you," said the Rev. Ross Parsley, who has replaced Haggard.

Ryan Price and his fiancee, Karen Geyer, were impressed. "It seemed genuine - from the heart. It's unfortunate but it happens," said Geyer.

"He's reaching out and asking for forgiveness," said Price.

Jones, who said he is gay, said he came forward because he was upset when he discovered who Haggard was and that New Life opposed same-sex marriage - a key issue in Colorado, with a pair of issues on Tuesday's ballot.

"I wish him well. I wish his family well," Jones said Sunday. "My intent was never to destroy his family. My intent was to expose a hypocrite."

The scandal has disappointed Christian conservatives, whom
President Bush and other Republicans are courting heavily in the run-up to Tuesday's election.

Many were already disheartened with the president and the Republican-controlled Congress over their failure to deliver big gains on social issues even before the congressional page scandal involving former Rep. Mark Foley (news, bio, voting record).

Haggard, who had been NAE president since 2003, has participated in conference calls with White House staffers and lobbied Congress last year on Supreme Court nominees.

Crist, the state attorney general, is in a close race with Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Davis to replace the president's brother, Gov. Jeb Bush, who can't seek re-election because of term limits.

Crist's chief of staff, George LeMieux, said the decision to skip the Monday rally with Bush in Pensacola wasn't a snub of the president, but a choice to appear in seven other cities where Crist has a chance of gaining ground.

"It's a big state. We need to be in all the places we need to be," LeMieux said. "It's because of the time and it's because there are some opportunities."

Davis seized on the news, saying the president is one of the Republican's biggest supporters.

"And now that the president is so unpopular, Charlie refuses to stand side by side with him," Davis said. "It says when the going gets tough, Charlie won't stand up."

Crist appeared with the president in September, raising $3.3 million for the Florida election. LeMieux said the decision has nothing to do with Bush's poor approval numbers.

Crist planned to campaign Monday in St. Petersburg, Orlando, Tampa, Fort Myers, Miami, West Palm Beach and Jacksonville.

A poll released Friday showed Crist with 50 percent of support among likely voters compared to Davis' 43 percent. The poll had a sampling error margin of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Davis got support Sunday from U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, who is also seeking re-election. Buoyed by a comfortable lead in the polls, Nelson has been able to campaign for fellow Democrats in tighter races instead of focusing only on his own campaign.

He stumped for Davis at three African-American churches in South Florida, then attended a rally in Manatee County with congressional candidate Christine Jennings, who is locked in a tight race with Republican Vern Buchanan in a traditional GOP stronghold.

Meanwhile, Davis' opponent, U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris, toured solo in the Tampa Bay area trying to turn out Republican votes. Polls have consistently showed Harris trailing.

Top Republicans, including Gov. Bush, initially tried to draft someone to run in her place. Staffers quit in droves. She also has had to answer questions about her dealings with a corrupt defense contractor.

Yet Harris remained optimistic Sunday.

"We've been behind in every single race, and the Republican establishment has never been with us, and we've won every time," she said.

The Bush administration has had a number of clashes in recent years with the Times, particularly for the newspaper's disclosure of its warrantless domestic spying program.

The newspaper, founded in 1851, wrote in its editorial: "On Tuesday, when this page runs the list of people it has endorsed for election, we will include no Republican congressional candidates for the first time in our memory."

"To begin with, the Republican majority that has run the House of Representatives -- and for the most part, the Senate -- during President Bush's tenure, has done a terrible job on the basics," the newspaper wrote.

"It's tax-cutting-above-all-else has wrecked the budget, hobbled the middle class and endangered the long-term economy. It has refused to face global warming and done pathetically little about the country's dependence on foreign oil," the Times added.

"Today we witnessed a landmark event in the history of Iraq: Saddam Hussein was convicted and sentenced to death by the Iraqi High Tribunal," Mr. Bush said to roars of approval in a hockey auditorium packed with supporters in Grand Island, Neb. "Saddam Hussein's trial is a milestone in the Iraqi people's efforts to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law."

The announcement out of Baghdad came as polls suggested some gains for Republicans. A Pew Research Center Survey released on Sunday found that the number of likely voters who said they would vote for the Democrats was now 47 percent compared with 43 percent who said they would vote for Republicans. Two weeks ago, Democrats had an edge of 50 to 39. A Washington Post-ABC News poll found a similar tightening.

These kinds of polls, about the so-called generic ballot, measure national trends and do not necessarily provide an accurate measure of what is happening in individual House and Senate races. Andrew Kohut, the president of the Pew Center, said the poll nonetheless found that Republicans were becoming more enthusiastic as Election Day approached, a sign that the party was making progress in addressing one of its main problems this year: a dispirited base.

With at least 20 House races and 3 Senate races virtually tied in polls over the past week, Republican officials have looked to the huge voter turnout operation the party has developed over the past six years as its last-stand defense to prevent Democrats from making big gains on Tuesday.

A series of Mason-Dixon polls published on Sunday suggested a tightening in two Senate races, Rhode Island and Maryland, that Democrats had been confident of winning.

Republicans over the past week have spent heavily in Maryland on behalf of Michael Steele, the Republican candidate seeking to fill the seat being vacated by Senator Paul S. Sarbanes, a Democrat. In Rhode Island, Senator Lincoln Chafee, the Republican, has spent heavily and banked on his family's long history in the state's politics to help him survive in a heavily Democratic state.

Ken Mehlman, the Republican chairman, said polls showed that Republicans and conservatives "were coming home," which he said "is what happens when voters focus on the choice before them."

Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, the Democrat leading his party's effort to win control of the House, said, "It's inevitable that there would be some tightening in the end."

Still, Mr. Emanuel, who has been careful this campaign to avoid the public expressions of optimism voiced by other Democrats, added, "This is making me nervous."

Across the country, Democrats also hailed the verdict in Baghdad but argued that it would make no difference in delivering stability to Iraq and would have little bearing on Tuesday's vote.

"I think it's a great verdict - I mean, Saddam Hussein is a war criminal and he's getting what he deserves," Howard Dean, the Democratic national chairman, said on "This Week" on ABC. "But I don't think it has any impact on the safety of America."

Representative John P. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who has become the face of his party's opposition to the war in Iraq, said the verdict was the right one but predicted it would not make a difference in this campaign. What would matter more, Mr. Murtha said, were editorials in military papers being published Monday calling for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

"When The Army Times, The Navy Times, The Marine Corps Times, they have all said that we're not supporting the troops, that they're losing confidence with the administration, that's what's important," Mr. Murtha said, campaigning in Croydon, Pa., outside Philadelphia, for Patrick Murphy, a Democrat seeking to unseat Representative Michael G. Fitzpatrick.

The fact that Mr. Bush was spending this last Sunday before Election Day in two of the most Republican states in the nation was testimony to how bleak a year this has been for the Republican Party and the president. And in Florida, the home state of his brother, Mr. Bush received what appeared to be another reminder of his political unpopularity when Charlie Crist, the Republican candidate for governor, backed out of a planned appearance with Mr. Bush in Pensacola on Monday.

Mr. Crist said that he needed to spend the day in more competitive parts of the state and that he was not joining the list of other Republican candidates who had snubbed Mr. Bush this year.

The White House, however, said this week that the president was heading to Florida specifically to help Mr. Crist, who, according to Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, invited Mr. Bush in the first place.

But an official with Mr. Crist's campaign, who would not talk for attribution, said that Mr. Crist had never confirmed the appearance.

On the final Sunday of the election cycle, the leaders of the four Congressional campaign committees took their seats around the table of "Meet the Press" on NBC, appearing together for the first time in the midterm contest - and promptly diving into a sharp exchange over the war in Iraq.

"To pull out, to withdraw from this war, is losing, there's no question about it," said Senator Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, the chairwoman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. "The Democrats appear to be content with losing."

Mr. Emanuel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, turned sharply toward Mrs. Dole, his face lined with outrage.

"You should take that back, Senator," he said. But Mrs. Dole kept speaking over him, creating a minute of partisan cacophony on the television set.

"I will not sit idly by with an accusation that Democrats are content with losing," Mr. Emanuel said.

Mr. Bush was unambiguous in hailing the conviction of Mr. Hussein as welcome news from a country where good reports have been in short supply this election season. That said, there have frequently been developments in Iraq over the past two years that Mr. Bush has proclaimed as turning points, only to see them followed by renewed violence and further deterioration.

And while these announcements of Iraqi milestones have at times produced a lift for Mr. Bush in the polls, the gains have tended to be fleeting.

Still, just before an election that is this close, Republicans suggested that the events of Sunday could be politically helpful.

A senior Republican Party official, who insisted on anonymity to speak about the political implications of the announcement, said it would invigorate Republican voters distressed about Iraq but would not have much effect beyond that. And Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, who is heading the Democratic effort to win back the Senate, said, "People are worried about the future of Iraq, not the past."

Senior aides to Mr. Bush scoffed at suggestions that the announcement of the verdict had somehow been orchestrated by the White House.

"Are you smoking rope?" Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, said Saturday in anticipation of the verdict. "Are you telling me that in Iraq, that they're sitting around - I'm sorry, that the Iraqi judicial system is coming up with an October surprise?"

White House officials were clearly prepared for the news, posing Mr. Bush before Air Force One to make a celebratory announcement as he left Waco, Tex., and inserting remarks about it into his speeches. On Sunday morning, Mr. Snow made a round of the talk shows to praise the development, echoed throughout the day by Republican surrogates and candidates.

Representative J. D. Hayworth, a Republican in a close race in Arizona's Fifth Congressional District, used a previously scheduled early morning appearance on the Fox News Channel show "Fox and Friends" to declare the Hussein sentence "a victory for the Iraqi people." Mr. Hayworth said it offered Americans heading to the polls "a chance to take stock" of the war's dividends.

From California to Missouri to Connecticut, candidates put up their final advertisements.

In Pennsylvania, Karen Santorum, Senator Rick Santorum's wife, speaks directly into the camera in a 60-second advertisement, looking almost mournful as she says that she has found attacks on her family for living in Virginia hurtful, explaining that they moved there to be closer to Mr. Santorum when he is working.

The pitched battle for control of the House and Senate in Tuesday's election has raised hope that voting will rise above its usual anemic levels. But competitive races are not reliable predictors of turnout and doubts exist about whether Republicans will be as fired up as Democrats and whether independents will vote with their feet or their seat.

As in other aspects of American life, the people who run elections work to make things easier for everyone. Yet they achieve little more than blips in increased turnout, if that.

Participation, paradoxically, is highest in states where making it to a polling station can be misery on a wintry day. Minnesota, Alaska, Maine, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Wisconsin and Wyoming are among states that lead the nation in getting voters out, and they put the Sunbelt to shame.

About 40 percent of U.S. citizens of voting age population cast ballots in nonpresidential year elections.

Despite the competitive nature of the 2000 presidential race and the certainty of having a new chief executive no matter who won, just more than half turned out. In 2004, a polarized year when everyone remembered the near dead heat four years earlier, turnout climbed over 60 percent - edging a little closer to the likes of Iran, Iceland and Somalia.

Some of the best states for voter turnout have conveniences such as same-day registration. But it is their culture of civic engagement that is most credited for their relative success. The expansion of absentee voting in many states has yet to produce a clear spike in overall participation.

Curtis Gans, who has been studying the riddle for three decades, says making voting easier does little to make people vote. "We know that it isn't procedure because we've constantly made procedure easier and voter turnout has gone down," he said.

Nor is it demographics.

The population today is more educated, older and less mobile than in the past - all things that should steer people to the voting booth. But that does not happen.

Gans' diagnosis: lack of motivation.

Blame the politicians, in part:

- the attack campaigning casting the choice as one between bad and worse;

- the lack of clearly defined choices on issues;

- the string of deviousness or wrong turns over the years - "I am not a crook," "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," "
Saddam Hussein ... continues to develop weapons of mass destruction."

And blame people and their culture, too.

"We've had the fragmenting and atomization of our society," Gans said, driven by the 500-channel TV culture, the interstate, strip malls, abandonment of farms and the rise of the Internet. "All of those things have undermined community."

Gans is director of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate at American University.

A recent AP-Pew poll looked at the 45 percent of the population that can be characterized as nonvoters because these people rarely vote even though most are registered.

Most broadly, the poll found that nonvoters are not just disconnected from politics, but also from their communities. Nonvoters were less likely to trust others, to have a strong support network of friends and family or to know their neighbors than regular voters were.

Among those who were unregistered, only 14 percent said it was complicated to register where they live. Most had not done so because they lacked the time, had not gotten around to it, had no confidence in politicians or just did not care.

The United States lags about 130 countries in voter participation. Discount ones that enforce compulsory voting laws - fewer than a dozen - and America's standing hardly improves.