Posted on 08/11/2002 5:43:52 PM PDT by Pokey78
Our YouGov poll on British opinion concerning the war against Iraq - which we publish today - poses significant but by no means insuperable challenges to the Blair Government and the American administration.
The results are a mixed bag, proving the old adage that the public can hold two or more diametrically opposed ideas in its head at once. Iraq may be a faraway country of which they know little, to borrow Neville Chamberlain's expression about Czechoslovakia, but the British people, of all age groups, socio-economic strata and sexes, entertain no illusions about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.
If so, few Britons will buy the rosy assessment of the Iraqi dictator as a quasi-Churchillian figure peddled by George Galloway in his interview with Saddam in the Mail on Sunday yesterday. The tone was reminiscent of Robert Maxwell's immortal exchange with the Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceaucescu: "So, President Ceaucescu, tell me, just why are you so popular with your people?"
But for the most part, few Britons will rally directly to Saddam's cause after the fashion, say, of the Left's adulation of the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua in the 1980s; even the anti-American Left can see that Ba'athism, with its ideological origins in inter-war fascism, is a poor repository for progressive politics.
Nor does it seem likely that there will be mass demonstrations after the fashion of the CND marches of the 1980s - which themselves were not very representative of the public at large.
The concerns of the public are, rather, practical. They have grave concerns over whether America actually can topple Saddam. It is clear that, in their eyes, the American armed forces have not recovered from the blows they suffered in Vietnam, despite the successes of high technology during the past decade in the Gulf war, Kosovo and Afghanistan.
They believe that there will be heavy military and civilian casualties - an impression played on by Saddam in his interview with Mr Galloway, when he predicts house-to-house fighting in urban areas. They fear Iraqi retaliation against the West.
They do not rate President George W Bush very highly and fear that war will somehow destabilise the whole region. Their attitude is squarely in line with what Henry Kissinger observed at the time of the controversial American intervention in Grenada in 1983: it is not that the Europeans so much wanted America to fail, but that they would rather it did not try to do anything in the first place.
All of these, though, are contingent concerns and, we suspect, not very deeply held. Ultimately, the public will defer to the Government's say-so in national security matters, in a way they do not on transport, health or even Europe.
But the impression of widespread opposition, including elements inside Labour and the trade unions, suits the Government's short-term needs well. When the Prime Minister does eventually swing into action, and blows away much of the opposition with a magisterial prime ministerial broadcast, it will make him appear all the braver to the Americans for having taken his opponents head-on. He may reckon that it will enable him to demand from them a greater say in the burgeoning "what happens after Saddam?" debate.
Such calculations still leave unresolved the question of what the Anglo-American message to their own peoples - and, for that matter, the rest of the world - should be. Any public diplomacy campaign will inevitably include such obvious expositions as displaying aerial images of Iraqi nuclear installations, much as Adlai Stevenson did when he brought American reconnaissance pictures of Soviet rocketry in Cuba before the UN Security Council during the missile crisis of 1962.
But such a campaign has to be about much more than simply convincing people of the need to destroy Saddam's arsenal before he has a chance to use or to threaten to use it, important though that is. It also requires clear explanation of why the Middle East would be a much more stable place if Saddam (and other regional radicals) were overthrown. For instance, they need also to show that it would make a settlement of the Arab-Israeli dispute far more likely.
Above all, the Western powers must demonstrate that a new, more democratic government in Baghdad would be immeasurably better, not just for Iraq's neighbours, but also for the entire population of Mesopotamia as well.
The unprecedented display of unity between Iraqi opposition groups in Washington this weekend (and, no less significantly, between the State and Defence departments, which sponsored the meeting) ought to make the Government reappraise its distinctly sniffy attitude about such groupings as the Iraqi National Congress. Such dissidents - some of them Saddam's torture victims - could actually be useful allies in convincing the British public.
It would be interesting to observe the likes of our next Archbishop of Canterbury trying to explain to an Iraqi Kurd why it would be jolly wicked for America and Britain to liberate his country.
For those not keeping abreast of the linguistic changes currently on-going in the English language, an ignoranus is a person who is both stupid AND an asshole.......
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Coming soon to a theater near you.
Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.
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