"“In the absence of the president making a persuasive case, many people don’t know how to judge what’s going on there,” Bacevich said."
The last statement in this article....see above.......is truly depressing. Apparently, Americans can not think on their own.....they need someone serving them pablum so they understand.
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Posted on Sun, Aug. 14, 2005
Majority of Americans have lost confidence in the war, polls show
By DICK POLMAN
Knight Ridder Newspapers
The fog of war has settled over the home front.
Bedeviled by the mounting casualties in Iraq and increasingly confused by the mixed messages emanating from war leaders, Americans in large numbers are losing confidence in the mission.
New polls report that for the first time, a majority of Americans reject President Bush’s contention that the war over there is making us safer over here. Indeed, barring major immediate progress in Iraq, some suggest that 2005 may well be remembered as the year when public opinion went south and never came back — a mood shift roughly analogous to 1968, when domestic confidence in the Vietnam War began its irreversible slide.
There has long been public frustration about the gap between administration statements and battlefield realities — witness Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s prewar prediction that the fighting “could last six days, six weeks, I doubt six months,” or that 92 percent of U.S. military deaths have occurred since Bush declared on May 1, 2003, that “major combat” was over.
But for a long time the restive Americans tended to be Democrats who already disliked Bush or who never bought his war pitch in the first place. What’s new today is that frustrations about the war are being voiced by those who backed the mission at the outset. These Americans — as evidenced in interviews by reporters from Texas to New York City during the past week — are increasingly alarmed by the facts on the ground and confused about the best course of action in the future.
Consider Pennsylvanian Eric Zagata. He is a 24-year-old from Luzerne who served in Iraq last year as a member of the 109th Field Artillery’s Bravo Battery until he was injured by shrapnel. He was luckier than the 92 Pennsylvanians slain thus far — in battle deaths, Pennsylvania ranks third in the nation, behind California and Texas — but he is a changed man.
“Going into it,” he said, “I just felt it was my obligation. Now I feel bad. I think we’re in such a spot. We can’t pull out of there because if we do, it would just be a waste of all our people’s lives and all their people’s lives. I think it’s a real Catch-22.”
His sentiments shifted after “seeing all these guys getting killed every day for nothing, really. We went over there, and we’re fighting this war, and we’re still paying $2.40 a gallon for gas. Eighteen hundred people have died, and nothing has been accomplished.” (The U.S. military death toll, on Friday, was 1,846.)
Or consider Marcy Price, 54, who was shopping Thursday near Fort Jackson, the U.S. Army’s largest basic training center, in South Carolina. She backed the war at the outset because “I thought that it was very worthwhile — that it was something we needed to do in response to 9/11.” However, “I changed my mind because of the length of the war” and because, as she sees it, the Bush administration has failed to show that Iraq, unlike Afghanistan, is a crucial front in the broader fight against terrorism.
These sentiments are reflected in the polls. When the war was a year old, in March 2004, about 65 percent of Americans were supporting the decision to wage it. But in the latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, support has sagged to 44 percent. Meanwhile, 57 percent now say that the war has made the U.S. “less safe from terrorism” — a Gallup record high and a key finding because it undercuts a core Bush argument for launching the war in the first place.
Retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, an expert on war and public opinion who teaches at Boston University, said: “At this point, the president has nearly exhausted the extra moral authority that he was granted after 9/11. It’s hard for people to accept battlefield deaths when they can’t see where a war is going.”
Debby Boarman, a 58-year-old retiree from Evansville, Ind., voted for Bush in 2000 and in 2004. But visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington last week, she said: “I don’t think he’s doing as good a job as he said he was going to do. I don’t like the way he is handling (Iraq) — well, he isn’t handling (it). … It’s more of a lack thereof.”
Bush can still count on staunch support from millions of Americans, including Greg Henning of Ohio, who was visiting Ground Zero in New York on Tuesday.
“If we had done this (war) in the 1990s, I don’t think (9/11) would have happened,” he said. He sees the Iraq casualties as an acceptable sacrifice because “if thousands of soldiers hadn’t died (in previous wars), we wouldn’t have been here right now” living in freedom.
And notwithstanding the attention focused on Cindy Sheehan, who is camping out at Bush’s ranch to protest her son’s death in Iraq, there are many women like Diane Eggers, a 51-year-old Bush voter from Euless, Texas, whose son, Kyle Eggers, was killed last December. She said: “He supported President Bush because he believed in what (Bush) was doing. There’s no good part of any war … You just have to go with it.”
The public’s growing bewilderment stems in part from the perception that Bush and his war leaders are communicating poorly. In the latest poll conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 64 percent say that Bush is failing to articulate a “clear plan” for winning the war, the highest negative share since the start of the conflict.
“In the absence of the president making a persuasive case, many people don’t know how to judge what’s going on there,” Bacevich said.
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