Dueling polls:
Bush Faces Daunting Task in Building Public Support
New Poll Shows Public Questioning Lack of War Rationale
washingtonpost.com
By Terry M. Neal
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Thursday, September 5, 2002; 11:26 AM
Most presidents would not get themselves rhetorically locked into such a monumental and important task, such as attacking another sovereign nation, without first building the case for doing so. A new poll released this morning by the non-partisan Pew Research Center suggests President Bush is paying the price for waiting so long.
According to the poll, only 37 percent of respondents believe the president has clearly explained the rationale for a war with Iraq, compared to 52 percent who believe he has not. The poll compared the current political environment to the one in August 1990, a few months before the first President Bush launched Operation Desert Storm in the Gulf War. In that case, 50 percent of Americans believed the president had clearly explained the rationale for a war compared to 41 percent who did not.
The poll also seems to suggest that while most support the president's goal of ousting Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, he still needs to work at building consensus domestically and internationally for the use of military force. Nearly two-thirds of Americans favor taking military action to end Hussein's rule, according to the poll. But that number drops to 30 percent when asked whether the U.S. should launch a war against Iraq without its allies. Only 42 percent of the poll's respondents said they would support an attack if U.S. forces "might suffer thousands of casualties." When those questions are combined — what if the U.S. launches a unilateral attack that cost the lives of thousands American soldiers — support drops to 18 percent.
This is where the president finds himself today. Even as the White House appears increasingly set on building the case for attacking Iraq, the voices of dissent have grown in Congress, among former high-ranking government officials, among foreign allies and among the public. The case for attacking Iraq appears unsettled even in his own administration, despite the protestations to the contrary of some.
The President's Problem
Even some of the most conservative members of Congress — House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Tex.) and Sens. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) and Larry Craig (R-Idaho), among others — say they could not support an attack on Iraq if they had to vote today. The problem, all agree, is that the president has not made a clear, compelling case for war.
The president summoned congressional leaders from both parties to the White House to argue his case Wednesday — a full seven months after Secretary of State Colin Powell told the House International Relations Committee that the president was set on "regime change" and considering "the most serious assessment of options that one might imagine." Bush plans to talk by phone to leaders of Russia, China and France, and he'll meet with British Prime Minister Tony Blair at Camp David this weekend. The president also made it clear for the first time that he would seek congressional approval for launching any military action.
This is Democracy at work.
When members of Congress returned home last month, they got an earful from voters who said the prospect of war with Iraq made them uneasy and that they were not sure why it was necessary. Voters have been subjected to weeks of news reports about resistance in the international community to a U.S attack on Iraq, disagreement within the administration, as well as opposition from GOP luminaries like James Baker and Brent Scowcroft.
A new war with Iraq would be a major change in U.S. military thinking in that the basis for it would be pre-emption — essentially, attacking the other guy before he attacks you. International law clearly frowns on this sort of thing, making it all the more important that a president lay out a clear explanation of the imminent danger and a strong argument about the price of inaction. But polls appear to indicate that the public wants to understand the justification for going to war when the policy of containment so far seems to have worked.
Congressional leaders returned to Washington this week expressing the concern and frustration they heard at home, with Republicans showing increasing impatience with the White House. At the same time, dissent is hardening among Democrats.
How could it be that a president who committed to ousting a foreign leader is just now attempting to convince members of his own party that he has just cause to do so? Part of the answer lies in timing. It is two months before the mid-term elections and members of Congress fear a backlash if they were to fail to support a popular president on a military engagement issue. And certainly part of it has to do with the president's stratospheric approval ratings. An overwhelmingly popular president can, at least for a while, dictate the terms of a debate with generalities and platitudes.
If the White House had become so overconfident that it believed Americans would follow wherever he led, it appears to be moving back to the realm of reality. The president's approval rating has dropped 20 points from 80 percent to 60 percent since the beginning of the year when talk of "regime change" in Iraq first began. He's still popular, but not so popular that he can rule by decree.
Even those who strongly agree with Bush's stance on Iraq, profess puzzlement at the way the White House has handled the Iraq issue.
"It's not the most orthodox way to do things," said William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine and a vocal supporter of attacking Iraq. "That's the way the Bush administration seems to work. But it may work out fine."
On the latter point, Kristol is probably right. History shows the public is highly malleable when it comes to foreign policy. Many pollsters and political observers agree that it's too early to predict doom for the president on this issue.
"Public opinion on foreign policy is different than public opinion on something like the economy," said Atlanta-based GOP pollster Whit Ayres. "It follows leaders rather than demands action from national leaders. Some of the Republican leaders [in Congress] are merely reflecting the reality that the president and his staff have not yet decided that its time to lay out all of the evidence on Iraq. Should they decide to do so, I have little doubt that the president can rally public opinion behind whatever he feels it's important to do."
In a brief exchange with reporters, the president suggested more details were coming, perhaps as early as next week. But for now, he found it best to stick to generalities.
"Saddam Hussein is a serious threat," the president said. "He is a significant problem, and he is something that must be dealt with."
A Case to be Made?
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld suggested the other day that the administration knows "some other things" that haven't been made public about what's happening in Iraq that has alarmed some people in the administration. Those things will come out "if and when the president decides that he thinks it's appropriate."
Yet the administration has done little to make its case even with the evidence that is already in the public domain.
Certainly most Americans think Saddam Hussein is a bad guy. But few know the extent of it. The most compelling case for overthrowing Saddam Hussein comes from two bastions of the left — Human Rights Watch and the New Yorker magazine. While neither directly — or indirectly for that manner — has called for war on Iraq, Human Rights Watch and the New Yorker have both explicitly detailed Hussein's genocidal efforts to wipe out his enemies among the Kurds of northern Iraq. And in a detailed 16,000 word New Yorker article reporter Jeffrey Goldberg offered compelling evidence of ties between Hussein and al Qaeda.
In Hussein's so-called Anfal campaign against the Kurds of 1988 [see Human Rights Report here], the dictator initiated a chemical attack that wiped out thousands of villages and killed well over 100,000 people, according to the estimates of Human Rights Watch. Many of those were boys and men whom Hussein's troops rounded up in the desert and summarily executed as they fled their villages. Some experts have put the number of people who died in that campaign and in the years after from cancer and other maladies caused by the chemical attack at upward of 200,000 people. Many of those who survived continue to suffer horribly from grotesque deformations and incurable diseases and maladies.
Some time after the massacre, Human Rights Watch obtained a tape of Hussein's cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, who lead the campaign against the Kurds, addressing members of Iraq's ruling Baath Party. "I will kill them all with chemical weapons!" he roared, speaking of his Kurdish enemies. "Who is going to say anything? The international community? [Expletive] them. The international community and those who listen to them."
Clearly, Hussein's scientists had the expertise to produce weapons of mass destruction 14 years ago. And even though he promised to destroy all of those weapons in an agreement with the United Nations after the Gulf War, inspectors were never able to substantiate that he did before the inspection program was suspended several years ago.
In the New Yorker, Goldberg details Hussein's war against the Kurds and offers evidence of his connections to a terrorist group known as Ansar al-Islam, which he controls jointly with al Qaeda. The report also suggested that some of the group's members trained in al Qaeda training camps run by Osama bin Laden and that Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's top aide, visited with Saddam and other top Iraqi officials in 1992.
Rumsfeld has accused Iraq of tolerating the presence of al Qaeda operatives. But to date, no one in the administration has publicly discussed the merits of Goldberg's reporting in detail.
Offering refuge to al Qaeda is one thing. Being an active partner with it is quite another. Does the administration have evidence of direct cooperation between Hussein and al Qaeda? At this point, we don't know. (Washington Post reporter Daniel Williams wrote about Ansar al-Islam in today's paper.)
"You don't have to be clairvoyant to know that Saddam retains chemical and biological weapons," said Jon Wolfsthal, deputy director of the non-partisan Carnegie Non-Proliferation Project. But he argues that there is little evidence that Hussein is close to developing nuclear weapons or the means to deliver them over long distances, and even less to suggest that he would share weapons of mass destruction with terrorist groups, many of which have been historical rivals. "While there's always a possibility that he could find some nuclear material on the black market, we think his nuclear capability is very small. You don't launch military attacks based on what's possible, but what's likely."
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