[Mb-civic] Recommended: "Why Iraq war support fell so fast"

Mon Nov 21 11:14:54 PST 2005

harry.sifton at sympatico.ca recommends this article from The Christian Science Monitor

US public support has dropped faster than during the vietnam and korean Wars

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Headline:  Why Iraq war support fell so fast
Byline:  Linda Feldmann Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
Date: 11/21/2005

(WASHINGTON)The three most significant US wars since 1945 - Korea, Vietnam, and now 
Iraq - share an important trait: As casualties mounted, American public 
support declined.

In the two Asian wars, that decline proved irreversible. With Iraq, the 
additional bad news for President Bush is that support for the war in 
Iraq has eroded more quickly than it did in those two conflicts.

For Mr. Bush, low support for his handling of the war - now at 35 
percent, according to the latest Gallup poll - has depleted any 
reserves of "political capital" he had from his reelection and 
threatens his entire agenda. Last week's bombshell political 
developments, both the bipartisan Senate resolution calling for more 
progress reports on Iraq and the stunning call for withdrawal by a 
Democratic hawk, Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, have not helped.

But the seeds of Bush's woes were planted early on. Just seven months 
into the Iraq war, Gallup found that the percentage of Americans who 
viewed the sending of troops as a mistake had jumped substantially - 
from 25 percent in March 2003 to 40 percent in October 2003.

In June 2004, for the first time, more than half the public (54 
percent) thought the US had made a mistake, a figure that holds today.

With Vietnam, that 50-percent threshold was not crossed until August 
1968, several years in; with Korea, it was March 1952, about a year and 
a half into US involvement.

Why did Americans go sour on the Iraq war so quickly, and what can Bush 
do about it?

John Mueller, an expert on war and public opinion at Ohio State 
University, links today's lower tolerance of casualties to a weaker 
public commitment to the cause than was felt during the two previous, 
cold war-era conflicts. The discounting of the main justifications for 
the Iraq war - alleged weapons of mass destruction and support for 
international terrorism - has left many Americans skeptical of the 
entire enterprise.

In fact, "I'm impressed by how high support still is," Professor 
Mueller says. He notes that some Americans' continuing connection of 
the Iraq war to the war on terror is fueling that support.

In addition, intense political polarization gives Bush resilient 
support among Republicans.

But among Democratic voters who supported the US-led invasion 
initially, most have long abandoned the president. In polls, 
independent voters now track mostly with Democrats. And, analysts say, 
once someone loses confidence in the conduct of a war, it is 
exceedingly difficult to woo them back.

"[Bush's] best option is bringing peace and security to Iraq," says 
Darrell West, a political scientist at Brown University. "If he can 
accomplish that, people will think the war's going well and that he 
made the right decision. But that's proving almost impossible to 
achieve."

Pollster Daniel Yankelovich, writing in the September/October 2005 
issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, states that "in my judgment the Bush 
administration has about a year before the public's impatience will 
force it to change course."

Not helping the president has been the modern phenomenon of 24/7 cable 
news coverage, which brings instant magnification to the daily death 
toll and the longstanding media practice of focusing on negative 
developments.

And there is the lingering public memory of Vietnam itself, which, in 
the Iraq war, may have made the public warier sooner of getting stuck 
in a quagmire.

Scholars like Mueller at Ohio State speak of an emerging "Iraq 
syndrome" that will have consequences for US foreign policy long after 
American forces pull out - particularly in Washington's ability to deal 
forcefully with other countries it views as threatening, such as North 
Korea and Iran.

"Iraq syndrome" seems to be playing out, too, with the American public. 
The just-released quadrennial survey of American attitudes toward 
foreign policy - produced jointly by the Pew Research Center and the 
Council on Foreign Relations - shows a revival of isolationism. Now, 42 
percent of Americans say the US should "mind its own business 
internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on 
their own" - up from 30 percent in 2002.

According to Pew Research Center director Andrew Kohut, that 42 percent 
figure is also similar to how the US public felt in the mid-1970s, at 
the end of the Vietnam War, and in the 1990s, at the end of the cold 
war.

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