The Blue Voice

«Home | Next: Andrew Young Hearts Wal-Mart»

Saturday, March 25, 2006

From Mission Accomplished to Mission Impossible

That would be Bush's current push to shore up support for the Iraq War and his own disastrous policies. In Bush's PR push on Iraq seen as a tough sell: A public soured on handling of war won't change, experts say by Edward Epstein San Francisco Chronicle 03/25/06, Andrew Bacevich is featured prominently.

Although, as is often the case in even really good newspaper reports, some of the best parts don't come until deep in the article. In this case, the very last paragraph, in which Bacevich comments on the meaning of Bush's probably inadvertent admission last week that withdrawing the last of the American troops from Iraq would be a decision for "future presidents", i.e., sometime after Bush leaves office in early 2009:

"He tacitly acknowledged this is a quagmire and admitted that 'I, the president of the United States, don't know how to get out,'" Bacevich said.

I've been trying to pay particular attention to how and why public opinion on the Iraq War is evolving. Because if the postwar politics of the Vietnam War are any guide, a few years from now various partisans will be furiously pushing some version of a stab-in-the-back theory, claiming that support for the war was going fine until the Liberal Media or the Traitorous Democrats or the Leftwing Sympathizers of Islamic Fundamentalism or Lord-knows-who-else undercut everything.

One of the authorities Epstein quotes makes an important observation about how the lies about WMDs used to justify the war initially have been very important in the collapse of public support for the Bush "stay the course" policy:

Paul Brewer, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, recently co-authored a paper on how Americans hold presidents accountable in wartime. He says there are two models: the "decision-maker" president and the "managerial" model.

Brewer said more Americans view Bush in the "decision-maker" mold because of his administration's decision three years ago to launch a pre-emptive war to remove Saddam Hussein from power and go after what were thought to be Iraq's biological and chemical weapons and abort Saddam's intention to develop nuclear weapons.

"It's the 'decision-maker' facts that hurt Bush because people don't see that the reasons for the war were true," Brewer said. Those people haven't been shaken from that view despite the president's speeches.

And Bacevich explains how Bush's "credibility gap" leaves him in a probably unsolvable dilemma:

"It's quite unlikely" that Bush's recent public relations offensive will make a dent in the public's negative view of how the war is going, said Andrew Bacevich, a professor of international relations at Boston University who is a former Army colonel.

"My view of his problem is that the administration has repeatedly announced that the war had reached a turning point ... and each time, that turning point didn't count. What he needs now is to be able to identify a real turning point in Iraq," Bacevich said.

Bush has no choice but to speak out, even if his message is repetitive and unconvincing to a large bloc of Americans, Bacevich added. "Iraq has become the reason for the existence of this presidency. He has no alternative but to try to change public opinion." (my emphasis)

posted at 1:42:00 PM by Bruce Miller

| +Save/Share | |