[Mb-civic] An article for you from an Economist.com reader.

Thu Nov 24 11:54:25 PST 2005

- AN ARTICLE FOR YOU, FROM ECONOMIST.COM -

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GEORGE BUSH
Nov 17th 2005  

Will George Bush succeed in his offensive against critics of the Iraq
war?

IT HAS been a mighty long time coming. But finally the administration
has hit back at the "Bush-lied-us-into-the-war" crowd. The president
has given two vigorous speeches on the subject in the past week--one in
Pennsylvania on Veterans' Day and one in Alaska on November 14th. Dick
Cheney, Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, and Ken Mehlman,
the chairman of the Republican National Committee, have backed up his
argument. And the White House has even posted a memorandum rebutting a
WASHINGTON POST article on pre-war intelligence. 

The two sides have been skirmishing about George Bush's use of
intelligence ever since the fall of Baghdad. Hostilities increased with
the death of the 2,000th soldier in Iraq and the indictment of the
vice-president's aide, Scooter Libby (who is accused of trying to cover
up briefings against a critic of the war that ended up "outing" a spy).
Now all-out battle is under way. No sooner had Mr Bush taken a swipe at
John Kerry than his old opponent accused Mr Bush of "playing the
politics of fear and smear on Veterans' Day". Both sides now have their
war rooms.

The political stakes could hardly be higher. Mr Bush not only risks
seeing domestic support for the war crumble further; he risks losing
his biggest political asset, his reputation for honesty and integrity.
The Democrats risk painting themselves as either opportunists (who turn
against a war when it goes badly) or buffoons (too dim to question
faulty intelligence when it mattered). They also risk exacerbating
their biggest weakness--their reputation for being soft on terrorism
and feeble on national security.

So who is getting the best of the argument? Mr Bush starts with one big
advantage: the charge that he knew all along that Iraq possessed no
weapons of mass destruction seems to be a farrago of nonsense. Nobody
has yet produced any solid evidence for this. Sure, Mr Bush made
mistakes, but they seem to have been honest ones made for defensible
reasons. He genuinely believed that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD--as
did most of the world's security services. And he was not alone in
thinking that, after September 11th, America should never again err on
the side of complacency. More than 100 Democrats in Congress voted to
authorise the war. 

But being right and being seen to be right are different things. Mr
Bush may not have consciously lied, but, egged on by Mr Cheney and
Donald Rumsfeld, he made dreadful miscalculations. The WMD never
materialised. The Iraqis who were supposed to greet American troops
with flowers threw petrol bombs at them instead. You cannot get things
so wrong--at a cost of thousands of lives--without paying a political
price.

Moreover, Mr Bush clearly entered the debate on Iraq with preconceived
ideas that skewed his handling of the intelligence. Those who supported
war had to jump over the equivalent of a matchbox while those who
advised caution had to leap over a mountain. And some of those
preconceived ideas were always false. The Senate Intelligence Committee
report suggests that the White House made repeated, if unsuccessful,
attempts to persuade the CIA to find links between Saddam and al-Qaeda.

All the signs are that the White House is losing the public relations
war. Mr Bush's average approval rating now stands at 37%. The latest
CNN/USA TODAY/Gallup poll found that 63% of people disapprove of his
handling of the war in Iraq. These doubts are undermining both his
reputation for honesty and his leadership of the wider war on
terrorism. The most recent NBC/WALL STREET JOURNAL poll shows that only
33% of Americans give Mr Bush high marks for being "honest and
straightforward", down from 50% in January, and 57% believe that he
"deliberately misled" the nation about the case for war in Iraq. In the
Gallup poll, for the first time a plurality of Americans (49%)
disapproved of Mr Bush's handling of the war on terror. During the 2004
election campaign Mr Bush relentlessly tied the war in Iraq to the
wider war on terrorism (with great success). But now this strategy is
misfiring. Doubts about Iraq are depressing support for the wider war
on terrorism.

HOW TO TURN YOUR BEST WEAPON AGAINST YOURSELF
This is a disaster for both Mr Bush and the wider Republican coalition.
The war on terror was the glue that held this fractious coalition
together as well as an acid that ate away at the Democratic Party's
credibility and unity. Now the situation is reversed. The Democrats are
united behind the "Bush lied" argument--and cock-a-hoop about opinion
polls that show they are restoring their traditional lead on
"Democratic" subjects like education and Social Security and improving
their standing on "Republican" ones like foreign policy and taxation.

At the same time the Republicans are in a tailspin. Most of the party
agrees with John McCain's view that "there is an undeniable sense that
things are slipping in Iraq". But conservative America is deeply
divided over what to do about this. Mr McCain believes in sending
another 10,000 troops. But on November 15th, Bill Frist, the Senate
majority leader, and John Warner, of Virginia, easily pushed through an
amendment calling for Iraqi forces to take the lead in providing
security next year and urging Mr Bush to lay out his strategy for
ending the war. 

All presidencies get the blues. But John Kenneth White, a professor at
the Catholic University of America, makes a point that ought to deepen
the White House's mood of despair. The difference between presidents
who can shake off the blues and those who can't comes down to one
thing: their ability to change the subject. Ronald Reagan and Bill
Clinton both succeeded in changing the subject. Lyndon Johnson, Gerald
Ford, Jimmy Carter and George Bush senior all failed to do so.

 Mr Bush is forever being forced to debate the same damn subject--his
decision to go to war in Iraq. And each time he debates it, a bigger
chunk of the audience turns against him. 

See this article with graphics and related items at http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_VTGJQJP

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