What emerges here is not fleeting disenchantment, but a coherent and hard-nosed critique of Bush's strategy. The administration's fundamental problem is not that the public is discouraged by U.S. casualties, or that news from Iraq has been bad, or that the president needs to give better speeches. The problem is that the public sees no stakes in Iraq sufficient to justify the military effort and diplomatic cost.
If Pew's findings are accurate, then presidential rhetoric and developments in Iraq have mostly ceased to matter. The public will not support a military operation that it has come to regard as social work on the behalf of Iraqis, rather than security work on the behalf of Americans.
"I think we've reached a point where news from Iraq itself is not likely to reverse the trajectory," says Scott Rasmussen, the president of Rasmussen Reports. By contrast, "troops coming home is a new dynamic. And that is what will change poll numbers." Indeed, a combination of returning U.S. forces and lower oil prices come November, Rasmussen says, would be "Democrats' nightmare."
And so, any day now, the president's political advisers will go to him and say something like this:
"Mr. President, if U.S. forces are not clearly on their way out of Iraq by about June 30, we will face a bloodbath in the midterm elections, and the Republicans will lose the House or the Senate or both. On the other hand, if U.S. forces are coming home, you will have cut the legs out from under the Democrats. They will have no choice but to support your drawdown or call for an even faster one. Either way, they would be in no position to blame you for any subsequent setbacks over there. Right now, you have nothing to say on Iraq that makes sense to the public. Once the troops start coming home, it will be the other side that has nothing to say."
Which will Bush choose? If political reality alone does not sway him, he will reflect that maintaining a massive Iraq deployment in the face of public hostility is unsustainable and ultimately counterproductive, setting up conditions for a Vietnam-style collapse and a backlash against Bush's democracy agenda.
So by spring, if not earlier, Bush will announce that progress in Iraq allows U.S. forces to start coming home. He will say that an American drawdown is the best way to help the Iraqis stand on their own. He will argue, much as he did with his tax cuts, that whatever pace he sets is precisely the right pace, and that withdrawing any faster or slower would be the height of irresponsibility. He may also say that withdrawing is "not a formula for getting out of [the region], but one that provided the only sound basis for America's staying in and continuing to play a responsible role."
Those were the words of Richard Nixon, who, somewhere, is wanly smiling.
© Copyright 2005 National Journal
Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer and columnist for National Journal and a frequent contributor to Reason. The article was originally published by National Journal.
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