Bush must counter bad Iraq news
For the past three months, the news from Iraq has been almost continuously bad, dominated by accounts of U.S. casualties. The Bush administration needs to counter it with good news — and more steps to improve the situation on the ground.
Of course, barring word of the capture or death of Saddam Hussein and his evil sons or the discovery of weapons of mass destruction, there’s no question that the killing or wounding of American soldiers will (and should) be front-page news. Still, along with the daily casualty counts, the administration could be issuing progress reports on the reconstruction effort in Iraq – on matters such as the number of hours the electricity is on in Baghdad, the count of Iraqis (especially police) back on government payrolls, and the volume of oil produced and exported.
Saddam Hussein — or whoever is directing military attacks against allied forces and sabotage of Iraq’s infrastructure — clearly is hoping to defeat the United States psychologically after failing to do so militarily. The enemy evidently calculates that Americans won’t stand for a steady climb in the U.S. body count — topped off, perhaps, by a sizable attack like the one that killed 273 Marines in Beirut in 1983 and drove the United States out of Lebanon.
According to Thomas Donnelly, a military expert at the American Enterprise Institute just back from Iraq, the U.S. military is especially gearing up against the possibility of major attacks on July 17, Baath Party National Day, designed to deliver a psychological jolt like the Vietnamese Tet offensive that damaged U.S. morale in 1968.
The enemy also hopes, apparently, that hot, tired, scared and demoralized American troops will commit acts of insensitivity or cruelty that will turn the Iraqi population decisively against the U.S.-led occupation. So far, public opinion polls tell a conflicting story about whether U.S. support for President Bush’s Iraq policy is holding.
Last week, a Gallup poll showed that only 56 percent of U.S. adults now think that Iraq was “worth going to war over” and 42 percent said it was not, down from 76 percent and 23 percent in April. A just-released Pew poll showed that only 23 percent now think the military effort is going “very well,” down from 61 percent in April, but 52 percent say it is going “fairly well” and 67 percent still say that going to war was “the right decision.”
Bush and his top advisers have dealt with the bad news from Iraq with statements of determination, defiance and, occasionally, defensiveness. At a Pentagon briefing, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld denied that attacks on allied forces constituted a “guerrilla war” or that the United States was caught in a “quagmire.”
Bush defiantly told a group of military re-enlistees that “these scattered groups of terrorists, extremists and Saddam loyalists … believe they have found an opportunity to harm America, to shake our resolve in the war on terror and to cause us to leave Iraq before freedom is fully established. They are wrong and they will not succeed.”
In the same speech, he served notice that turning Iraq into a model of democracy, moderation and prosperity “is a massive and long-term undertaking,” suggesting that he will devote large-scale resources to it over a long period.
Beyond determination, however, the continuing Iraq war and postwar needs to be fought with forces, money, and solid, steady information given to the U.S. population and the Iraqis on progress in reconstruction.
Such reports need to be regular and well publicized to at least ameliorate the sense that only bad things are happening in Iraq.
In a forthcoming article in The Weekly Standard, Donnelly writes: “President Bush’s word always has been undercut by the uncertainty of administration policy and a curious tendency to commit resources that match the rhetoric.” Iraq is too important for that to happen again.
(Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill.)