THE PROBLEM WITH BUSH'S IRAQ SPEECH

THE PROBLEM WITH BUSH'S IRAQ SPEECH

People Power

by Lawrence F. Kaplan

Only at TNR Online Post date 10.07.05


Yesterday, in his long overdue bid to rally public support for the U.S. enterprise in Iraq, President Bush sounded less like a president determined to win a war than a president determined not to lose one. Long gone were the war's cascading rationales. In their place was a defense of the war which amounted to this: If we leave, things will be worse. Or, as the president put it, "Would the United States and other free nations be more safe or less safe with Zarqawi and bin Laden in control of Iraq, its people, and its resources?" About the war in Iraq, there is no more essential and urgent truth than the one Bush's question raised. But when it comes to the American public, this particular truth won't have much traction.

To begin with, the alternative-would-be-worse line of reasoning has been employed by so many presidents, and so disingenuously, that it's not even clear the public would respond to the argument were it offered sincerely. "In Iraq," Bush said, "there is no peace without victory." This counts as a far cry from Richard Nixon's Vietnam mantra, "peace with honor." But Nixon, too, pledged never to abandon an ally, promising that he wouldn't be the first American president to lose a war. He was. A decade later, in the aftermath of the October 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, President Reagan vowed not to withdraw U.S. troops from Lebanon. "Are we to tell them their sacrifice was wasted?" he asked in a publicly televised address. He promptly withdrew the remaining U.S. forces. Exactly a decade after that, in the aftermath of the October 1993 fiasco in Somalia, President Clinton repeated the exercise: "We face a choice: Do we leave when the job gets tough or when the job is well done? Do we invite the return of mass suffering or do we leave in a way that gives the Somalis a decent chance to survive?" Clinton opted for the former, ordering U.S. forces to hunker down in their bunkers, and then withdrew them altogether.

Bush, unlike Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton before him, seems genuinely committed to the cause of battlefield success. But he faces a vastly more skeptical public than either of his predecessors did. Nixon, for one, didn't have to contend with opinion polls showing majority support for withdrawal from Vietnam until 1970-1971, by which time he had enshrined withdrawal in official policy. As for Reagan's experience, in the aftermath of the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, public support for the U.S. intervention increased. Similarly, when 18 Rangers were killed in Mogadishu, NBC, ABC, and CNN polls found that 61, 56, and 55 percent, respectively, favored sending more troops to Somalia. These levels of support evaporated only as it became clear the presidents themselves no longer backed the missions. Today, the situation has reversed itself: The president supports the mission, but no one else does.
Hence, in the space of two and a half years, Americans have arrived at a point it took them six years to reach during the war in Vietnam: Opinion polls today show clear majorities favoring one form of withdrawal or another. Various measures of wartime opinion can be, and have been, turned around--during the Korean War, for example, poll respondents swung wildly between saying the war was a good idea and saying it wasn't. But never before has a war survived a public verdict in favor of canceling it altogether. If history offers any guide, nothing the president can say or do will reverse this sentiment.

Which isn't to say he shouldn't bother trying. Historically, one of the preconditions for sustaining public support during wartime has been a president's ability to make the case for pressing on--a finding culled from a mountain of opinion data by, among others, Peter Feaver, a Duke University scholar who now works in the White House. But the same data shows that two other conditions must be fulfilled as well: The public needs to believe the stakes justify continued casualties and it must believe the United States will emerge triumphant. As to the former, surveys dating back nearly two years have reported that the public sees no compelling interest to justify further casualties in Iraq. In theory at least, this measure can be reversed, especially if Bush succeeds in making the case that the stakes have increased along with the specter of "Zarqawi and bin Laden in control of Iraq." What Bush can't reverse is the perception that we're losing the war.

Nor, absent some clear evidence or at least barometers of success, do events in Iraq seem likely to change people's minds. Suicide bombings, U.S. casualties, political mayhem--no amount of speechifying can wish away the nightly news. If the administration really intends to persuade Americans that the war can be won, it would have to make some progress toward actually winning the war. That would mean bolstering rather than cutting troop levels in Iraq, and substantially expanding the army's ranks. It would mean overhauling tactics on the ground, moving away from big-unit sweeps and toward a viable counter-insurgency strategy. It would mean not rushing headlong into a constitutional crisis or otherwise devising fig-leaves for a U.S. withdrawal. It would mean mobilizing national power on a scale not even contemplated by the administration. Yes, the president delivered a fine and necessary speech yesterday. But no war was ever won by spin alone.

Lawrence F. Kaplan is a senior editor at TNR.