THE DUST SETTLES
July 10, 2003

by Joe Sobran

     Only a few months ago, the Bush administration and 
its supportive media had painted a clear picture for us. 
Iraq, under the tyrant Saddam Hussein, had "weapons of 
mass destruction" that posed an "imminent threat" to the 
United States and its allies. It had connections to 
terrorist groups and was part of an "axis of evil." 
Unless we acted swiftly, the "smoking gun" might be a 
"mushroom cloud."

     The bright side was that an American victory would 
"liberate" Iraq, ridding it of a Hitler and bringing 
democracy to it. The success of democracy there would 
lead other Arab countries to follow suit, until the whole 
Middle East was democratic.

     How's it going?

     It's still early for regional transformation, but 
there is precious little evidence that the administration 
was right, growing doubt that it was even candid, and 
heavy suspicion that it never really knew what it was 
doing. After what at first appeared to be a warm welcome 
from the Iraqis, American soldiers are now being killed, 
not in large numbers, but often enough that the pro-war 
WALL STREET JOURNAL is calling for "larger-scale 
detentions" (concentration camps?) to quell the Sunni 
population.

     If memory serves, the war was supposed to have 
something to do with the events of 9/11, Osama bin Laden, 
al-Qaeda, and all that. The connection is now more 
obscure than ever. The whole rationale for the Iraq war 
already sounds quaint. The apocalyptic conflict has 
settled into a muddle.

     The JOURNAL points out that in May 1967, when more 
than 10,000 American soldiers had already died in 
Vietnam, half the American public still supported that 
war. This is supposed to be an argument for hanging tough 
in Iraq.

     But surely the real point is that though many 
Americans loyally backed the Vietnam war for years, a 
large majority eventually had severe second thoughts. 
Nobody who remembers that conflict would choose to relive 
it, and the politicians know it.

     This is why the U.S. Government now sticks to easy 
wars against weak opponents, with low U.S. casualty 
figures guaranteed. If Iraq had posed anything like the 
dramatic threat the president described, he would have 
hesitated to attack it. He backed down quickly from 
menacing North Korea when that country boasted of its 
nuclear capacity.

     Second thoughts about the Iraq war have set in. Some 
of these are loud and explicit. The Democrats want to 
know whether Bush was given faulty intelligence about the 
supposed threat. More radical voices simply accuse him of 
lying.

     But more of the second thoughts, as in the case of 
Vietnam, are quiet and implicit. Few Americans really 
believe they are better off, or safer, because Saddam 
Hussein was routed. They realize that there was no real 
threat. Whether Bush lied or was misled or merely 
believed what he wanted to believe, it was all bluster.

     Like his father in 1991, Bush won an overwhelming 
victory at little cost and with overwhelming public 
support due more to a diffuse patriotism than to any felt 
need for war. And in the first Gulf war, the ease of the 
victory came as a surprise; many expected Vietnam-level 
losses. On the other hand, the first President Bush 
lacked the impetus of a 9/11 catastrophe that could make 
Americans feel they were really in some sort of danger. 
That was a war to restore the violated boundary between 
Iraq and Kuwait.

     Later it turned out that the atrocities ascribed to 
the Iraqis -- ripping infants from incubators, and so 
forth -- had been fabricated. Victory brought no sense of 
relief or well-being, and the president's temporary 
popularity as a war leader evaporated before the 1992 
election.

     In retrospect, the American public may be more 
confused about the latest war than they were before it 
began. They don't feel demoralized, let alone betrayed, 
but they sense that the administration's story doesn't 
add up. If they still support it, they do so with passive 
approval, tempered by quiet doubts, rather than strong 
emotion. The fighting mood has long passed.

     So it's doubtful that the Iraq war will be a real 
political plus for the president in the 2004 election. 
The most that can be said for it is that it wasn't a 
Vietnam-sized disaster. Despite his bold rhetoric, Bush 
waged this war with great caution, keeping the stakes 
low. But that also means that he didn't really win very 
much.

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