The Bush administration is showing concern that the spiraling chaos of events in Iraq and Israel may damage the President's re-election bid.

Although senior Republican strategists decline to discuss the prospect openly, some are whispering that the centerpiece of the Bush administration - handling of national security, and the war in Iraq in particular - could now become a vulnerability rather than an asset. One senior administration official conceded that the suicide attacks in Iraq and Israel last Tuesday made 'by far the worst political day for Bush since 9/11'.

In less than a month since Bush proclaimed that 'conditions in most of Iraq are growing more peaceful' and pronounced that 'pretty good progress' was being made toward Middle East peace and a Palestinian state within two years, the illusion of progress has been shattered.

With the road map to peace in Israel deeply troubled, Iraqi resistance to foreign occupation growing stronger, and the US returning both to the UN to ask for help in Iraq and calling on Yasser Arafat to rein in Hamas, Bush is being advised to revise his political message that conditions are improving with realism that there is unlikely to be a 'peace dividend' by the time of the election in 15 months.

'We should not try to convince people that things are getting better,' said former Reagan official Kenneth Adelman. 'Rather, we should convince people that ours is the age of terrorism.'

With the US economy improving, the apparent unraveling of Bush's plan to bring about the peaceful transformation of the Middle East by invading Iraq is now the President's weakest link.

'A couple of months ago, everyone believed national security was the President's trump card,' said one Republican adviser last week. 'Now, we could be in a position where the economy is growing and the vulnerability could be on the national security side.'

But continued chaos in the Middle East will further deprive the administration of its key justification that war in Iraq would ultimately make the world a more peaceful place.

Recent polls show that the Government's credibility on Iraq has dropped in the past two months, with more Americans saying that they are skeptical about the intelligence used to justify the war. At the same time, 50 per cent of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein had clear ties to al-Qaeda. On Friday, Bush reemphasized the connection, saying that he believes a 'foreign element' of 'al-Qaeda-type fighters' are moving into the country.

To offset the potential for political damage, Bush aides have begun preparing Americans for the long haul. Comparing the task to the Cold War, Condoleezza Rice recently wrote that the US and its allies will need to commit to 'a long-term transformation' of the Middle East. In a speech on Tuesday in Missouri - a key state in the presidential election - Bush is expected to echo that line.

The dawning realization that Bush's foreign policy may have created precisely the opposite effect to the one intended has given opponents new vigor. Senator Joseph Biden, the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, warned last week that Bush's plan for a more peaceful world 'has clearly not occurred'.

On the contrary, 'the world is more apprehensive about our leadership', Democratic presidential contender Richard Gephardt said. 'The President seems oblivious to the fact that we're over there almost alone. We're not getting less violence, we're not getting the country put back together, people are getting killed, and the forces are stretched thin.'

But Republican pollsters say that, although the percentage of the public that call the war and its aftermath a success has dropped from 85 to 63 per cent in three months, there is still no cause for undue political concern.

'There is a substantial potential for the occupation of Iraq to become a deep political problem for Bush,' John Mueller, an analyst on public opinion and war, told the New York Times.

'If things go well, people will lose interest, but if things go badly people are increasingly likely to see the war as a mistake. Starting and continuing wars that people consider mistaken does not enhance a President's re-electability.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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