Iraq War: Public disapproval

"I think we are winning.  Okay?  I think we're definitely winning.  I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05

"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.

Here are some quick takes on the crashing public support for Bush's Iraq War and some of the things involved with it.

Stalled on Home Front, Bush Looks Abroad by Edwin Chen Los Angeles Times 06/26/05

"Foreign affairs becomes a refuge for every second-term president as his powers weaken at home," said Harvard University scholar David Gergen, who has advised presidents of both parties.

"What's been a surprise is that typically the window of opportunity is about 18 months, when they can expect to get something done before attention turns to the midterm elections. The window seems to be shutting on Bush much earlier."

Bush's Credibility Takes a Direct Hit From Friendly Fire by Doyle McManus Los Angeles Times 06/26/05

Bush and his aides have delivered a positive, if carefully calibrated, message. The war is not yet won, they acknowledge, but steady progress is being made. "We can expect more tough fighting in the weeks and months ahead," the president said in his weekly radio address Saturday. "Yet I am confident in the outcome."

But last month, Vice President Dick Cheney broke from the administration's "message discipline" and declared that the insurgency was in its "last throes." The White House has been paying a price ever since.

Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), who supported the decision to go to war in Iraq, complained that the White House was "completely disconnected from reality." Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), another supporter of the war,charged that Bush had opened not just a credibility gap, but a "credibility chasm."

Gosh, who would have ever thought that Dark Lord Dick Cheney would lie about the war in Iraq?  I'm shocked, shocked to hear such a thing!

But why do competent historians have to embarass themselves like this?

Historian Robert Dallek, a biographer of President Lyndon B. Johnson and an outspoken critic of Bush, said: "Analogies are imperfect, and I hate to press this one, but this is so much like Vietnam. It has echoes of the Vietnam experience when senators like [Arkansas Democrat J. William] Fulbright began to hammer Johnson on our aims and goals and credibility….

When Chuck Hagel insists on having public hearings into the Downing Street Memo, then I'll listen if you want to make comparisons to William Fulbright and the Vietnam War.  Otherwise, it's just ridiculous.

Then there are pollsters embarassing themselves:

"What's interesting in this decline in support for the war is that it has sprung from the public itself," said pollster Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center. "It wasn't led by politicians or by an antiwar movement. It started back in May, when the focus in Washington was on other issues."

Kohut seems to be good on a lot of things.  But those people who are opposing the war in the polls are the antiwar movement!

There was an antiwar saying from the Vietnam War days, "What if they gave a war and nobody came?"  Now we could ask, "What if we had an antiwar movement and the Big Pundits and the mainstream press were too lamebrained to recognize it?"  And the answer would be, we'd have the "press corps" that we actually do have in 2005.  As Bob Somerby often says, if we didn't have this press corps, you couldn't invent them.

Let's see, 60% are so of the public think the war wasn't worth it.  Nearly half say the war was more George Bush's fault than Saddam Hussein's.  And people who presumably can read without moving their lips look at that and say, "Gorsh, that's funny.  All these people are against the war and there ain't even an antiwar movement."  What is going through these people's heads?  Just what the [Cheney] do they think an antiwar movement is?!?

As Iraq effort drags on, doubts mount at home: Recruiting falls short and polls show desire to bring troops home by Brad Knickerbocker Christian Science Monitor 06/17/05.

Asked in a Washington Post/ABC poll last week whether the US "is making good progress" or "has gotten bogged down" in Iraq, 65 percent chose the latter. Meanwhile, the number describing US casualty levels there as "unacceptable" has risen to 73 percent, the highest point since the US-led invasion of Iraq began.

Dadgum if that doesn't sound like and antiwar movement to me.  Close to three-quarters of the public think casualty level are unacceptable?  How high does it have to be for the Big Pundits to recognize an antiwar movement?

[Sociologist] Dr. [David] Segal and other experts cite several reasons for this.

One is that what the White House dubbed "the global war on terrorism," which began with the attacks of September 2001 and has become centered in Iraq, now has lasted longer than the period from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day, ending World War II in the Pacific.

Meanwhile, the all-volunteer force, begun in the wake of political opposition to the Vietnam War, means that fewer and fewer Americans have any direct connection to the armed services.

"It's not so much an estrangement as it is a distance between the military and society," says political scientist John Allen Williams of Loyola University Chicago.

But I'm sure after Bush appeals for volunteers to fight in Iraq Tuesday night, Young Republicans will flock to join by the tens of thousands.