Americans won't decide, based on those issues.
Way back when the tanks first smashed through to Baghdad, March 2003, it was clear we'd been lied to. We'd been told that thousands of chemical shells had been issued to all Iraqi artillery units in the field. We overran those units, and found nothing. Yet, most Americans ignored this, and all the other evidence, until recently.
We have also been ignoring all the stories of prisoners dying when in our custody, and all the stories of the massive random firepower that has caused a lot of innocent civilian deaths.
Clearly, Americans:
1. don't mind being lied to, at least in a winning cause
2. don't care how many Others we kill, as long as we win.
But Americans won't tolerate a Loser. And we don't like a lot of Americans dying. If Bush could win this war, and win it without getting many of our soldiers killed, he'd be forgiven all his lies, and forgiven all the unnecessary deaths of non-Americans.
But we are losing the war. The Taliban is slowly rebuilding in Afghanistan, and we have made a complete mess of Nation Building there. In Iraq, our soldiers are pulling out of the cities, our proxies (U.S.-trained police) are getting shot to hell, and the various militias are fighting turf wars with each other, to control the ground we are giving up.
The only issue that matters is U.S. casualty rates, and whether the President can spin it to make our withdrawal look like "peace with honor". |
