Lil Orphan Danny

In a republic of leakers, a relic still thinks he's alone

Michael Young | October 7, 2004

(Page 2 of 2)

Revealingly, only 26 percent of respondents said that the U.S. military's actions in Iraq were "successful", while 24 percent said they were "unsuccessful." A majority, 49 percent, said they were somewhere "in between." This suggested that while many in the public were more or less willing to toe the administration's line on the big picture in Iraq, they realized that the performance on the ground was sorely lacking.

A recent New York Times-CBS News poll following the first debate between George W. Bush and John Kerry confirmed that performance was an issue. While 57 percent of respondents said they approved of Bush's handling of terrorism (against 37 percent), the direction switched when it came to management of the Iraq war: "Asked what kind of job Mr. Bush had done in anticipating what would happen in Iraq as a result of the war, 59 percent said he had done a poor job and 34 percent said a good job."

What the polls seem to show is that voters in the past months have been less concerned with how the Iraq war was falsely depicted by the administration, the subject of many of the early leaks, than with how it has been handled since the insurgency became a major headache. While it may be hazardous to draw general conclusions from just two polls, John Kerry apparently hit on something when he made competence the issue in Iraq. That's why the NIE and Bremer's disclosures may be potentially more devastating than Kwiatkowski's, or those, for example, in books by Richard A. Clarke or James Bamford, with their focus on prewar administration deception.

When it comes to leaking, Ellsberg, whose release of the Pentagon Papers appears, ultimately, to have had little effect on the course of the war in Vietnam, must know that some leaks are more equal than others.