Democratic analyst Ruy Teixeira observes that Bush's post-Saddam-capture poll "bounce" is turning out to be more ephemeral than even skeptics expected:
Hard to say until we see a few more polls, but it is interesting to note that the just-released Time/CNN poll, which was conducted December 30-January 1, has [Bush's] approval rating at just 54 percent, only a couple of points over their mid-November poll. This poll be one of the first to reflect the public's realization that the capture of Saddam Hussein did not, in fact, end the war in Iraq, nor even appreciably reduce the amount of violence directed at US troops.
And in a more detailed follow-up post, he notes that "by a wide margin the public said US priorities should be to focus on finding Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda members, rather than focus on dealing with Saddam and Iraq (61 percent to 24 percent)."
Juan Cole also has some thoughts on the subject of whether Saddam's capture made us safer:
By 2003, he had no weapons of mass destruction, nor any serious programs, and had not had since the early 1990s. There has been no proven link between Saddam and terrorist actions against the US, and the US State Department did not even list Iraq as a major supporter of terrorism in recent years. I have never been able to understand how anyone thought Saddam, the clearly addled leader of a small, weak, battered third world country, who did not even have the support of his own people, posed an active threat to the world's sole remaining superpower. The US even used to bomb Iraq at will, while the Baath was in power, and did so repeatedly. If Saddam was a threat to us, then so is the Congo (and the Kabilas have not been nice rulers, either).
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