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The American People: Against the Iraq war and Apathetic

There is a strange disconnect in America at the moment, with the press partly to blame but in the position to do something about it, or at least explain it. You may be surprised to learn that nearly 6 in 10 Americans feel the Iraq war is “not worth it,” according to a recent Gallup […]

There is a strange disconnect in America at the moment, with the press partly to blame but in the position to do something about it, or at least explain it. You may be surprised to learn that nearly 6 in 10 Americans feel the Iraq war is “not worth it,” according to a recent Gallup poll. Exactly 50% feel that President Bush “deliberately misled” them on the issue of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and virtually the same number call the war an out-and-out “mistake.” More than 56% now say the war is going badly for the United States. Gallup also recently found that 46% of those polled say we should start withdrawing troops.

Yet there are few marches in the streets (or anywhere else), and even fewer editorials in major newspapers calling for a phased pullout or setting a deadline for withdrawal. But that’s not my main concern here. No matter where you stand on the Iraq war, you’ve got to wonder: What’s going on here at home? Yet few in the press have set out to explore this gap between what appears to be wide public anger and apathy: the enormous number of Americans who support our troops while, at least indirectly, devaluing their service by claiming this is a war not worth fighting.

For months, E&P Online has tracked various Gallup polls on this subject, and watched the numbers rise and fall. After the Iraqi elections in January, public opinion briefly shifted in a more positive direction, but that was quickly reversed with a return of wide violence and a rising American death toll this spring. Yet despite all the front-page coverage and punditry in the papers, it still seems that the war, and any deep feelings about it, are stuck in slow motion, or in quicksand.

That’s why every week when we consult Gallup, I’m always surprised to find the growing public doubts about the war. Most of the time, in our work and play, you’d hardly know a war was going on. There is more opposition to this war than there was in 1968 with regard to Vietnam, yet far less public and editorial protest. That 57% of Americans say the war is “not worth it” is haunting: such clarity, and such acceptance. ~Greg Mitchell, Editor and Publisher

This mystery of this disconnect can be resolved fairly quickly. Even after last week’s failed vote calling for a withdrawal plan, discontent in Congress remains the province of the ‘backbenchers’ in both parties, and no one of any prominence in the congressional leadership has dared to utter the word withdrawal. Without a signal from media and political elites, the public will remain docile and quiescent, even if it is furious. Such is the state of American self-government, as it is inevitably the lot of any mass political order to be guided by and be dependent on its demagogues.

The American public is heavily conditioned in its opinions by what it is told by its news outlets and its politicians. To call for withdrawal would be to unleash some horror on Iraqis that they are not already suffering. The now-infamous “Pottery Barn” metaphor is thrown in to tap into some latent, atrophied sense of decency in the American people. When the ordinary American is told, time and again, that it would be “irresponsible” to withdraw from Iraq, that a withdrawal might lead to civil war or that we must “finish what we started,” and he hears relatively little dissent against this that he does not already regard as vaguely treacherous, he keeps his desire to demand withdrawal in check. He wouldn’t want to be “irresponsible” with the lives of others, now, would he? He thinks that to demand withdrawal at this point would supposedly be to let “terrorists” win and sabotage our government in wartime, just as he has been trained to think.

The fact that these claims are all untrue, indeed that these are all lies to some degree or other, does not occur to most Americans. Persisting in error cannot correct an earlier error, and continuing to commit injustices in occupation will not make up for the great injustice of the invasion. Wasting more American lives will not endow dead American soldiers’ lives with more meaning, but will simply cost more American families irreplaceable sons for no good reason.

The American people are responsible for the idiotic, destructive policies of their government only as long as they continue to endorse them thoughtlessly. They can make some small atonement for their past errors if they repudiate the entire policy. Or they can persist in sheepish silence as the death toll mounts to no purpose and with no clear end in view.

Later in the article, Mitchell relates that most of those being polled also believed that the war would ultimately benefit Iraqis. This seems to explain partly why so many people have turned against the war without any widespread protest. This is also surely a measure of the depressing ignorance of the average American about the “benefits” the Iraqis have received from this invasion. Check Riverbend for the latest on the various improvements that Iraqis have been experiencing in the past month.

But it has never been a question of tangible proof of better conditions, has it? It is the abstraction that Iraqis are now “free,” where before they were under the heel of a tyrant, even though most Iraqis did not suffer unduly because of the tyranny and most have suffered unduly because of the “liberation.” The inhabitants of Tokyo c. 1944-45 were undoubtedly equally “better off” for having been “liberated” via incendiary bombs.

What is this bizarre idea that any nation is better off for having been conquered and devastated, its national honour thrown in the gutter, its army scattered and disbanded, its people subject to the indignities of occupation and the depredations of thugs? Against that faith in abstraction with which many Americans have been infected rational arguments and evidence cannot prevail, because the ethereal freedom that Iraqis enjoy on some imperceptible level makes their real suffering, misery and deaths and the deaths of our soldiers “worth it” to us, even if it is not “worth it” to them.

If Americans remain convinced that “staying the course” for the benefit of Iraqis makes enough sense to overlook all of the many reasons why the war is wrong, and wrong for America, everyone could be theoretically against the war and still feel compelled to allow its continuation. We cannot know what Iraqis want or need with any certainty, and our attempts to act as if we knew have been failures, so we must stop pretending that the decision about our withdrawal really has anything to do with Iraqis. It is a decision about what is best for our country, and that cannot be muddled by irrelevancies and the interests of other states.

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