I was surprised to see that the Republican-controlled Congress is holding hearings on Iraq this week.

Then I read the results of the new ABC-Washington Post poll, and I realized that it's not going to hurt the GOP if hearings are held -- apparently, it could help the GOP, and Bush in particular.

We're having the deadliest month for U.S. soldiers in Iraq, the 9/11 commission hearings have shown just how many warnings of 9/11 the government knew about, book after book has attacked the Bush administration's version of events ... and yet Bush's numbers have gone up significantly.

Here's the statistic from the ABC-POst poll that explains this:

Nearly half of Americans ranked the situation in Iraq or the war on terrorism as their biggest concerns this election year. About one in four singled out Iraq as their most important voting issue, more than double the proportion who expressed a similar view five weeks ago. Almost as many said the war on terrorism is the issue that will determine their vote, also up from last month.

At the same time, the proportion who said the economy and jobs are most important dropped by 10 percentage points, to 26 percent, after data that suggest the economy is growing and beginning to create large numbers of jobs.

Apparently, it doesn't matter what's going on in Iraq, or in Afghanistan, or in the effort to make the country secure against more terrorism -- if the country's focused on Al Qaeda/Iraq/terror (which most Americans, of course, think is one big thing), then Bush wins -- no matter what's going on, no matter how bad things are.

For far too many voters -- maybe a majority -- good war news would confirm their sense that Bush is a strong leader ... and bad news confirms their sense that they need a strong leader like Bush.

If I'm right about this, the Bushies don't need a big, evil "October surprise" to win -- they just need something, anything, that will put terror or fighter jets on the front page through the fall. It doesn't have to be a new war -- it could just as easily be yet another crummy month in Iraq.

(By the way, I've believed for a while now that if there were another 9/11 before the election, Bush would win in a massive landslide.)

I don't know how Kerry gets over this hurdle. Paradoxically, his best chance might be if the incompetents in the administration stop screwing up so much in Iraq, so the issue will move to the back burner.