Antiwar.com Blog

It seems to me that in order to be successful in his attempt tonight to reverse the course of public opinion on the Iraq war that President Bush will have to do something that is likely to be very difficult for him personally: acknowledge that the war is not going as well as he had hoped it would be by this time, and that judgments early on — how many troops to send in during the original invasion, how seriously to plan for the aftermath, whether to factor in the possibility of not being greeted with flowers and dancing — had something to do with this. I think he further has to admit that some of his, and especially Cheney’s, assessments of how things were going in the recent past — two weeks ago, three months, six months, a year — were not quite accurate.

He has to do this, I think, because, as he realizes to some extent or he wouldn’t have scheduled the speech, increasing numbers of people are profoundly skeptical about how he has handled the war. A Washington Post-ABC News poll released today shows 56 percent disapproving of the way he is handling Iraq. Americans don’t believe Cheney that the insurgency is in its “last throes;” only 22 percent think it is on the decline.

He can do this. He can say he acted on the best information available at the time, but that wars are messy and sometimes decisions don’t turn out well, but he’s learned and continues to learn from experience. He can point out that WW II was going badly after a year-and-a-half and that he warned us from the beginning that it would be a tough slog, but it’s worth it and the Middle East is starting to stabilize.

I don’t think he’ll succeed, however, unless he’s a lot more candid than is his usual wont about sharing some of the responsibility for bad decisions or miscalculations at various times. Without that it will seem as if he’s addicted to rose-colored glasses and will lose even more credibility.

I doubt he can pull it off, but we’ll see.

From a good read in today’s New York Times by John Tierney:

The Crow Indians rode with Custer at Little Bighorn, but they have since reconsidered. On the anniversary of the battle Saturday, they cheered during a re-enactment when Indians drove a stake through his fringed jacket and carved out the heart of the soldier going by the name of Yellow-Hair in Blue Coat Who Kills Babies, Old Men and Old Women.

Their revised opinion is understandable considering what has happened to them since that battle to get their valley back from rival tribes. Today it’s a Crow reservation with enough land and mineral resources to make each tribe member a millionaire, yet nearly a third live below the poverty level, and the unemployment rate has reached 85 percent.

What went wrong? Before Custer, the Crows had prospered by trading with whites, but he represented a new kind of white: the one who tells you he’s from Washington and he’s here to help you. As the economists Terry Anderson and Fred McChesney have documented, the downfall of the American Indians correlates neatly with the rise of two federal bureaucracies.

The first was the standing army established during the Mexican War of the 1840s. Before then, settlers who wanted Indian land usually had to fight for it themselves or rely on local militias, so they were inclined to look for peaceful solutions. From 1790 to 1840, the number of treaties signed with Indians each decade far exceeded the number of battles with them.

But during the next three decades there were more battles than treaties, and after the Army’s expansion during the Civil War the number of battles soared while treaties ceased. Settlers became an adept special interest lobbying for Washington to seize Indian land for them. For military leaders, the “Indian problem” became a postwar rationale for maintaining a large force; for officers like Custer, battles were essential for promotions and glory.

Indians no longer had any bargaining power, and they were powerless to resist the troops that avenged Custer’s death. They were consigned to reservations and ostensibly given land, but it was administered by another bureaucracy, the agency that would grow into what’s now the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The agency, in addition to giving some of the best land away to whites, allotted parcels to individual Indians with the goal of gradually transferring all the land and ending federal supervision. But what self-respecting bureaucrats work themselves out of a job?

Oh, the parallels!

As a side note, the defeat of Custer – who was heroically attempting to slaughter an entire village, as commemorated in this popular print from the time – did not dissuade America from staying the course.

So Dubya’s giving a prime-time address tomorrow, and from all indications, he won’t be saying anything new. Rah-rah troops, yay democracy, boo terrorists, stay the course – we all know it like the Pledge of Allegiance by now. One should never underestimate the mind of Karl Rove, of course, but this move has me bumfuzzled. What is to be gained? If the president’s advisers think so highly of his rhetorical skills as to believe another of his speeches will stand public opinion on its head, then we really are ruled by madmen. And if the speech doesn’t change a significant number of minds, then what?

According to this polling graph from the Wall Street Journal (via Justin Logan), the public has favored a quick withdrawal over staying the course ever since the war began – with one exception, in November 2004. (Remember that Bush’s reelection with 51 percent that same month was hailed as a mandate.) By February 2005, right after the Iraq election, the margin was already around 60-40 in favor of leaving soon, and it’s now 63-33. Americans – including plenty who voted for Bush – believe that the job is either done or undoable.

If tomorrow’s tired ploy fails, we’ll have a pretty reliable forecast for Bush’s second term. I expect hot and unpleasant, with a strong chance of midterm storms.

UPDATE: A new Washington Post-ABC News poll [.pdf] offers a different view of the public mood on withdrawal. From the article:

As President Bush prepares to address the nation about Iraq tonight, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that most Americans do not believe the administration’s claims that impressive gains are being made against the insurgency, but a clear majority is willing to keep U.S. forces there for an extended time to stabilize the country.

The survey found that only one in eight Americans currently favors an immediate pullout of U.S. forces, while a solid majority continues to agree with Bush that the United States must remain in Iraq until civil order is restored — a goal that most of those surveyed acknowledge is, at best, several years away.

Hmm. Elsewhere in the survey, we find:

* 53% say the war was “not worth fighting”

* 62% say the U.S. is “bogged down” in Iraq

* 60% are not confident “that Iraq will have a stable, democratic government a year from now”

* “Do you think the anti-government insurgency in Iraq is (getting stronger), (getting weaker), or staying about the same?” 24% say stronger, 53% say about the same, and 22% say weaker.

So the war wasn’t worth fighting, we’re bogged down, democracy and stability aren’t in sight, there’s no progress versus the insurgency – yet when asked, “Do you think (the United States should keep its military forces in Iraq until civil order is restored there, even if that means continued U.S. military casualties); OR, do you think (the United States should withdraw its military forces from Iraq in order to avoid further U.S. military casualties, even if that means civil order is not restored there)?” only 41% chose the latter? The poll from the Wall Street Journal asked “Do you favor keeping a large number of U.S. troops in Iraq until there is a stable government there or bringing most of our troops home in the next year?” To which 63% said withdraw in the latest survey. Any explanations for the glaring discrepancy?

Gee, I’m so glad that we sacrificed 1,700-plus dead, thousands more horribly wounded, and hundreds of billions of dollars — for this:

“Physicians have been beaten for treating female patients. Liquor salesmen have been killed. Even barbers have faced threats for giving haircuts judged too short or too fashionable.

“Religion rules the streets of this once cosmopolitan city, where women no longer dare go out uncovered.

“‘We can’t sing in public anymore,’ said Hussin Nimma, a popular singer from the south. ‘It’s ironic. We thought that with the change of the regime, people would be more open to singing, art and poetry.’

“Unmarked cars cruise the streets, carrying armed, plain-clothed enforcers of Islamic law. . . . Shiite religious parties now control both the streets and the council chambers. And though Basra has not suffered the same level of bombings and assassinations as major cities to the north, the trade-off for law and order appears to be a crackdown on social practices and mores that were permissible under the secular, if repressive, regime of [Saddam] Hussein.

“. . . A local businessman who did not want to be identified for fear of reprisal compared the current strict rule to life under Hussein. ‘The same thing is happening now,’ he said. ‘During Saddam, we had the secret police. Now it’s coming again. If you say something bad, they shoot you in the night.'”

Andrew Sullivan, Christopher Hitchens, Glenn Reynolds, and all the smarty-pants know-it-alls who hailed the “liberation” of Iraq as the triumph of modernity, and “democracy, whiskey, sexy,” owe everybody — and especially the people of Iraq — an abject apology.

What’s happening in Basra today is more like “theocracy, thuggery, creepy.”

Hat tip: Needlenose

A visual representation of the coalition deaths since the invasion of Iraq. (via ICasualties.org)

According to Arianna Huffington, this story is a load of BS. The anticlimactic ending seems to be that Cheney left the hospital under his own power after an angina attack, though it’s amusing to note that the White House appears to consider this episode is worth denying. Maybe they should think about the distraction value of an Executive branch health crisis since Americans are beginning to notice that the reality in Iraq bears no resemblance to the rosy scenarios painted by the Bush administration.