Everyone — including Andrew, below — is debating the meaning of poll numbers that show a post-election slip in public support for the Iraq War (or, more specifically, for fighting the war in the first place, since most people still want to finish the job . . . whatever that may mean). Kevin Drum sees it as part of a general post-Mission Accomplished decline in pro-invasion sentiment, which is fair enough — but as David Adesnik rightly notes, the numbers had either flatlined or were declining very slowly during the run-up to election day, and they’ve gone south much faster since Bush won re-election. So there’s clearly something more going on here.
Josh Marshall’s argument (Andrew has the money quote) that Bush supporters had to indulge in a little cognitive dissonance about the war in order to stand by their man does sound like a smarter take . . . but I’d like to meet some of these hypothetical self-deluding Bush voters before I endorse it.
IT’S THE COVERAGE, STUPID: What’s more likely, I think, is that the media coverage has shifted since the end of the election, and that people’s attention patterns are shifting accordingly. A lot of conservatives howled that the press was playing up bad news from Iraq in order to take down Bush, and there were probably some cases where this was true (the Al Qaaqaa kerfluffle, at the very least, seemed like an attemped media “October Surprise”). But in the larger scheme of things, what really happened during the election sprint was that the political coverage drove the Iraq coverage off the front pages — which meant, in turn, that most people stopped paying attention to the news from the Middle East.
This would explain why attitudes toward the war were largely frozen in place from primary season, really, until election day (check out Drum’s chart) . . . people simply weren’t thinking about Iraq, except maybe as a campaign issue. Now, however, there aren’t any more stories about Bush pressing the flesh in Ohio, or the Swift Vets coming out with another ad, or Kerry flubbing the names of Red Sox players — and so Iraq is once again the country’s biggest news story. And the more people pay attention to what’s happening there, I suspect, the less the war seems like a good idea.
STICKING WITH IT: Of course, believing the war was a mistake (as I do) doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be in it to win it. The question is how . . . and fortunately, Michael Ledeen has the answer. The way to bring democracy to Iraq, you see, is to bring democracy to Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. Piece of cake! Sign me up!
I’m being unfair, I know . . . but the trouble with Ledeen is that he always seems to have one idea (“democratic revolution”) about what to do, and very few ideas about how to do it. He writes:
No, we can only win in Iraq if we fully engage in the terror war, which means using our most lethal weapon – freedom – against the terror masters, all of them. The peoples of Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia are restive, they look to us for political support. Why have we not endorsed the call for political referenda in Syria and Iran? Why are we so (rightly and honorably) supportive of free elections in the Ukraine, while remaining silent about – or, in the disgraceful case of outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell, openly hostile to – free elections in Iran and Syria? Why are we not advancing both our values and our interests in the war against the terror masters?
This is a masterpiece of vagueness. Freedom is a potent weapon, I’ll grant you (and also a “messy” one, as Donald Rumsfeld can attest), but how, exactly, is it to be unleashed in the Greater Middle East? Does Ledeen really think that if the U.S. starts publicly calling for a democratic revolt in the streets of Tehran and Damascus (not to mention Saudi Arabia, where the results would probably not be to our liking), our diplomatic power is going to make the mullahs and Ba’athists magically melt away? Or does he really mean that we should first call for free elections, and then put boots on the ground to make it happen?
Either way, I wish he would be more explicit in his intentions and more detailed in his plans. It’s not as if we have excess diplomatic capital to play with these days — let alone excess armored divisions.
Slower, please.
–Ross
The Dish 