A year ago this week, President Bush let loose the dogs of war. That act changed the nation of Iraq, reshaped the Middle East, changed the nature of the war on terrorism, sent waves of shock and awe around the world — and changed the nature both of his presidency and of his campaign for re-election.

The Bush presidency had been jolted once before, of course; the terrorist attacks of 2001 gave him a voice and his presidency a mission. But by beginning a pre-emptive war, Bush sealed his fate as a war president.

Abraham Lincoln was a war president by fate, Bush a war president by choice.

So much so, in fact, that his strategists are preparing his re-election campaign with that phrase — war president — in mind. Indeed, in the Bush case (and not, for example, in the case of Lyndon Johnson, who had a war of his own, or Richard Nixon, who inherited the war from LBJ), it is difficult to separate the war from the presidency. Bush is no poseur here. He’s a war president.

A war president

Which means that he is setting out on a path that surprisingly few have trod before. James Madison was a war president, but that was two centuries ago. Lincoln was one. James K. Polk had a war but probably doesn’t count as a war president. The same is true for one of Bush’s great heroes and models, William McKinley.

Woodrow Wilson surely had a war — the Great War it was called, though America’s involvement in World War I began only in 1917 and ended in 1918 — but he staked his presidency far less on the war than on the peace. In fact, when he ran for re-election in 1916, his campaign slogan stressed peace: He kept us out of war. And the president’s father, though commander in chief during the first Gulf War, ran for re-election at a time of peace, and the issue in 1992 was the economy, not the war.

In this parlor game of a particularly perilous sort, the biggest question is whether Franklin D. Roosevelt qualifies as a war president. Not, almost certainly, for most of his dozen years in the White House. But there is little question that after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt was a war president. At a press conference, he once asserted that Dr. New Deal had been replaced by Dr. Win the War. He’s remembered for saving capitalism — and democracy.

He won the election of 1944, too, just as Lincoln, who was in more political trouble than FDR and had a parlous economy to boot, won re-election 80 years earlier. In an 1864 speech, Lincoln cited a Dutch aphorism (“it was not best to swap horses in midstream”) that Roosevelt, who had Dutch heritage, implicitly embraced during World War II.

Stay the course?

Now George W. Bush is making the same argument, which is why he is portraying Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts as too unsteady a hand in too troubled a time. It is a gamble — Kerry is, after all, a Vietnam veteran while Bush’s National Guard service during the Vietnam era is still a matter of some mystery — but all presidential campaigns are inherently gambles, and this is the strongest one the president can make.

“If the economy were booming, if the markets were moving to new highs, if we were building excellent new bridges to Russia and China,” says Shirley Anne Warshaw, a Gettysburg College expert on the presidency, “then Bush wouldn’t be calling himself a war president.” Perhaps not. But the president will surely argue that the wars he has prosecuted — on terror, in Afghanistan, in Iraq — have made it impossible for him to pursue much of anything else.

Presidents engulfed in combat seldom are repudiated at the polls, unless you count Johnson, who withdrew from the 1968 race and whose designated successor, Hubert H. Humphrey, was defeated that November. The other possible exception was Jimmy Carter, who was more a “crisis president” than a war president; he was dogged by his failure to win the release of the hostages in Iran and was defeated by Ronald Reagan, who also stressed high unemployment and high inflation.

But Bush is a different kind of war president, primarily because this is a different kind of war. “Most war presidents are involved in large-scale mobilization of troops,” says Martha Joynt Kumar, the Towson University expert on the presidency. “And though this has defined his presidency, here we’re involved with a struggle that is happening behind the scenes. Usually a war president has a country he opposes. Bush opposes a concept — terrorism.”

Position carries political risk

That defines his presidency, but it also defines his risk. Last week’s Wall Street Journal/New York Times Poll showed that 64 percent of Americans endorsed the president’s decision to go to war. But in taking on terror, the president is vulnerable if the nation is vulnerable. In extending the war on terror to a more conventional plane in Iraq, the president’s fortunes are tied to the fortunes of the great political experiment in Iraq and to the great military struggle against terror cells in Iraq and elsewhere that play by different rules than most opponents.

His Democratic rivals are cynical of the president’s self-portrait as a war president. But one look at the man tells you that there is something to that self-portrait. The stress and the strain are there, in his mannerisms, in his face. And in his eyes is the knowledge, shared by all military commanders, Dwight D. Eisenhower included, that no matter how a commander prepares for battle, he never can anticipate how it will proceed. The same goes, Bush must know, of any president running for re-election, even as a war president.

David Shribman is a columnist for Universal Press Syndicate.