public opinion in Iraq/ what's the price of war

[briannell]

The Empire’s New Clothes
The cost of the war in Iraq is almost beyond imagining. But as it comes into focus, it’s no wonder that the public is turning against it.
SHADOWLAND
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Christopher Dickey
Newsweek
Updated: 12:33 p.m. ET June 25, 2005
June 24 - So the polls show most Americans don’t “think it was worth going to war in Iraq.” An even bigger majority, almost six in 10, are dissatisfied with the Global War on Terror or, as the inside-the-Beltway types call it, the GWOT. This may seem a little contrary, even ungrateful, given that the same Americans are increasingly confident they won’t have to face another terrorist attack like 9/11 anytime real soon. (Only 4 percent thought one might happen in the next few weeks.) Something seems to be keeping the terrorists at bay. President George W. Bush says it’s the war in Iraq. So is the public just churlish? Or stupid? I don’t think so. What we’re seeing with these recent polls, in fact, is a return to common sense.
The more that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claims he’s not worried about public opinion, the more obvious it is that he is. During hours of grilling by suddenly emboldened congressional skeptics yesterday, he claimed, lamely, that popular support would swing back behind the Iraq war because Americans have “a good center of gravity.” But he’s smart enough to know that is precisely why they’re growing immune to the administration’s spin.
A clear head and a calculator will tell you very quickly that the costs of this conflict in Iraq are on a scale far beyond whatever benefits it was supposed to bring. If Saddam had been behind 9/11, OK. But he wasn’t. If he’d really posed a clear and present danger to the United States with weapons of mass destruction, then the invasion would have been justifiable. But he didn’t, and it wasn’t. Bringing freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people is a laudable goal, but not one for which the administration made any worthwhile preparations—which is why the occupation has been so ugly, bloody and costly. Tabloids may amuse their readers with snapshots of Saddam in his skivvies, but it’s the Bush administration’s threadbare rationales for postmodern imperialism that have been exposed.
“Some may disagree with my decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power,” the president suggested in his weekly radio address last weekend, “but all of us can agree that the world's terrorists have now made Iraq a central front in the war on terror … Our troops are fighting these terrorists in Iraq so you will not have to face them here at home.”

Wait a minute. Who disagreed about Saddam? Do you know anybody anywhere, who said, “Hey, the Butcher of Baghdad is a stand-up guy, let’s keep him around”? The problem was always what or who might come after. What skeptics said was, “Occupying Iraq is a dangerous idea because 1) it will cost an enormous amount of blood and money, 2) it’s an open-ended commitment that has no defining moment of victory or scenario for departure and 3) zealous terrorists will thrive there under foreign occupation, then spread anti-American violence far and wide.

We’ve been making these points in the Shadowland column and NEWSWEEK articles ("The Perils of Victory") since before the shooting started in 2003 ("20/20 Foresight"). Now other sources, from the blogosphere to the CIA, are reinforcing that message every day. The New York Times reported this week, for instance, that Langley figures Iraq may be a more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was (a problem we’d noted most recently in March in a piece called “Jihad Express”).
One of the hardest issues for the American public to grasp has been the enormous price tag, as if numbers, repeated often enough, lose their meaning. When the president first asked for an $87 billion supplemental appropriation for the GWOT back in 2003, the issue dominated the headlines. Another supplemental, almost as big, was passed by Congress last month with minimal public outcry.
You have to keep telling yourself, “That’s billions with a B,” and even then the concept blurs. But the Cost of War site (costofwar.com) run by the Massachusetts-based nonprofit and officially nonpartisan (but liberal) National Priorities Project crunches the numbers for you simply and effectively. As I write, the NPP calculates that we’ve spent almost $179 billion in Iraq. That could have paid for some 23.7 million American preschoolers to attend a year of Head Start. It might have funded global AIDS programs for 17 years. Not that it would have, of course. Security is security. But compare the budget for the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Safeguards division: $100 million a year to try to track down and monitor people trying to build nuclear weapons on the sneak. We spend $100 million on the Iraq war every couple of days. Are we safer for that?

No. If we’re safer, it’s largely because the war in Afghanistan and covert operations in Pakistan managed to round up or kill most of the key organizers of 9/11 by the spring of 2003. What we’re facing today are new dangers from new terrorists—and new dangers we are likely to bring on ourselves.

The great, tragic, unforgivable irony of the Iraq war is that we are well and truly stuck with it. A year ago, we might have set a credible timeline for departure without seeming to cut and run. Today, nobody would believe us. A pullout under fire, even with Iraqi troops guarding our backs, would diminish American credibility for a generation to come, and give the new crop of terrorists a triumphant vindication for their savage tactics.

Yet as public support for the war effort wanes, the chances that we’ll wind up scrambling for the exits increase. For the American troops serving, fighting and dying there—with more than 1,700 killed so far, and many times that number maimed—this is incredibly demoralizing. "When my soldiers say to me and ask me the question whether or not they've got support from the American people or not, that worries me,” Gen. John Abizaid, the ranking commander in the Middle East, told Congress yesterday. “And they're starting to do that."

So the Bush administration will continue waving the flag, spinning the facts, playing with images of hope and fear as it tries to distract the public from the responsibility that Washington bears for what is happening. But there has been so much of that; fewer and fewer people are convinced anymore. At the end of the day, there’s probably only one thing that can unite this country behind the Iraq war again, and that would be a return to fear: a new, massive attack on the United States.

Have the terrorists themselves thought of that? Are they holding back just now, biding their time, and using the Iraqi training ground to hone their skills at slaughter? Are the terrorists fighting in Iraq precisely because they’re getting ready to face us here at home? We’ll look at those questions next week.

© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.