Posted on 12/12/2005 5:00:48 AM PST by Rebelbase
In Iraq, the milestones add up, along with the casualties.
This week, less than two months after U.S. military deaths surpassed 2,000, another milestone arrives: the 1,000th day of America's bloody ordeal in Iraq.
The signpost -- today in the United States, Tuesday in Iraq -- comes three days before Iraqis are due to elect a permanent government. It comes as a defiant Saddam Hussein, toppled months after the start of the war, stands trial.
It comes as American patience with the war has grown short, tempers have ignited on Capitol Hill and pressures have mounted for an exit strategy.
Twice before in the last half-century, U.S. presidents -- Harry S. Truman in Korea and Lyndon B. Johnson in Vietnam -- have been crippled politically by wars that have lasted this long. Bush's popularity has plummeted, too, as he has struggled to convince America that progress is being made in Iraq.
What will happen in Iraq remains in doubt, but the war seems bound to define the Bush presidency.
"He's spent a lot of capital on this -- perhaps more than he would like," says Eric Larson, a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corp. "They define their administration on the national security issue. ... How they handle this is essentially how they're going to be judged."
At 1,000 days, the Iraq war is distinctive for more than its length.
"It's the first war that has divided the country by party," according to Gary Jacobson, a political science professor at the University of California-San Diego.
With Iraq, he says, polls typically show a 50 to 60 percentage point gap among approval for the war, with little support among Democrats and overwhelming backing by Republicans.
In Vietnam, for contrast, the gap was never larger than 15 percentage points, and in Korea it didn't exceed 20 percentage points, the professor says.
"For Bush, it's good and bad," Jacobson says. "As long as he keeps Republicans on his side ... he can continue to prosecute the war. He doesn't have to worry about the fact that his (popularity) numbers are so low. ... It's bad because the rest of the country isn't behind him."
Public support for Iraq has eroded faster than it did for Vietnam and Korea when measured by casualties, according to John Mueller, an Ohio State University political scientist who studies war and public opinion.
Mueller says by early 2005, when there were about 1,500 U.S military casualties in Iraq, polls showed more than half of those surveyed considered the war a mistake. He says the public didn't reach that threshold in Vietnam until the 1968 Tet offensive, when there were about 20,000 deaths.
"The main reason is it's not as valued," he contends. "Vietnam was seen as an important element in the war against international communism. Support did drop off, but it dropped off more slowly."
But with no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq and no convincing links to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the stakes in the war have been reduced, Mueller says.
"Establishing democracy or basically nation-building hasn't been terribly popular if it costs lives," he says. "They (the Bush administration) didn't sell the war as a humanitarian venture. They sold it as a grave and gathering threat."
Not everyone agrees.
Christopher Gelpi, a political scientist at Duke University, says the public is willing to sacrifice U.S. lives in a war "if they think a mission has a reasonable chance to succeed."
Gelpi acknowledges many Americans are dissatisfied with the war. But, he says, "Bush has been successful in one important aspect -- he has persuasively argued that failure would be extremely damaging to U.S. interests" and allow al-Qaida to flourish in Iraq.
And while surveys show serious doubts about the administration's strategy -- a recent New York Times/CBS News poll found only one in four people said Bush has a clear plan for victory -- Gelpi says the president can reverse those attitudes.
"He needs to show success on the ground," Gelpi says. "That's a tough task. It's difficult to show decisive victories." If Bush can demonstrate that Iraqi forces are controlling more territory peacefully, he says, that would be a significant measure of progress.
Polls measuring support for the war show many Americans think it was a mistake and are skeptical of Bush's plan, but they aren't ready to pull out immediately or give up on success in Iraq.
"There's still a glimmer of hope," says Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. "It's really frayed around the edges. But it's there. ... American troops have died. Money has been invested. We have a stake in the war on terrorism."
But the public clearly remains disenchanted with Bush's handling of the war: 58 percent disapprove, according to an AP-Ipsos poll taken in December.
Yeah, especially when every military action results in victory, and the Lame Stream Media ignores it in favor of displaying the tragic results of militarily useless roadside bombs, which have taken the lives of as many "insurgents" as they have American troops.
"Bloody"?
The reason this is the first major conflict divided by party is that this is the first major conflict run totally by a republican president.
In all previous long wars, there was a democrat in charge.
Republicans wouldn't divide by party over a war. The democrats seem to have no problem with it.
The last time the country divided by party so much over a war was the Civil war.
I believe that after Nixon took over, the opposition to Vietnam was lead in congress by mostly democrats, and it was democrats who voted to cut off support for South Vietnam after we promised to come back to their aid after we "redeployed" out of the area because "we were inciting the insurgency".
I still can't believe not one MSM folk have been able to point out that Murtha's strategy is much like our vietnam strategy.
American deaths from hostile fire are 1642, which works out to less than two deaths a day. If this is the MSM's definition of a "bloody ordeal," they live on a different planet. Almost twice as many people were killed on 9/11 in a few hours. We are fighting the people who carried this out. You don't gauge the success of the mission using casualty figures.
What is going on now in Iraq is not a war. We already won the war in 2003. It is not even a guerrilla war at this point. The enemy is setting off IEDs and car bombs. There are no real military confrontations, small units or otherwise once Fallujah was taken. They pose no military threat to the coaltion forces or the Iraqi government. The only threat they constitute is political, primarily due to the hype in the MSM.
I completely agree.
"As long as American soldiers are getting killed nearly every day, we're not going to be giving much coverage to the opening of multimillion dollar sewage projects. American lives are worth more than Iraqi sh!t."
Yeah, American lives are worth a lot to liberals, but only if their loss can be used to trash the U.S. war effort and undercut all efforts of the C-in-C and his administration to bring some long-overdue sanity to the Middle East.
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