Barcelona, Spain
Poll sceptics and poll scorners are poking and prodding the surveys with alarming frequency these days. (I confess to be one of these nerve-wracked legions.) Analysts who ought to know better are mining the poll data for good news and bad, massaging the figures, turning them upside down and sideways, pushing aside their knowledge that scads of measurement errors render their microscopic scrutinies more prayerful than scientific. Lets face it: such investigations are nervous tics to ward off anxiety anything to divert the mind from the wide-open anxiety of these momentous pre-election months.
In their our zeal for clairvoyance amid the fog of prognostication, poll-watchers curiously resemble the Congressional committees who, face to face with the Bush administrations desolate position in Iraq, can barely camouflage their grimaces by hunting for someone to blame for the Abu Ghraib debacle. Generals are being hung out to dry. (Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski, who may or may not have been in charge of Abu Ghraib and whose career has now crashed and burned, is now saying that the army brass was aware of the charges months before they slouched into an investigation.) Courts-martial are being summoned with breathtaking speed. But its harder, with every passing revelation, to track the chain of ultimate responsibility anywhere but the White House.
In truth, it seems evident that the horrors of Abu Ghraib and other prisons yet unnamed in Afghanistan and who knows where else could not have materialized had the administration not committed itself to a hallucination: the belief that Saddam Husseins bureaucrats of terror were functionally the same as al-Qaidas massacre squads, who were in turn functionally the same as the Iraqis who were shooting at Americans.
The Bush team blundered into a war on terrorism that should have been a focused, determined police action of a new kind. The war against a new enemy was conducted with a carelessness that allowed the higher-ups permissive instructions to filter down to the lowers-down who were relied on to do its dirty work. Now, barely a day passes without some further revelation of the fraudulence of the case that Bush with Secretary of State Powells crucial act of public credulity before the U. N. Security Council in February 2003 foisted upon a panicky America hungry for a hope that an ounce of intervention would be worth a pound of cure for fanatical terror. Witness the downfall of Ahmad Chalabi, not so long ago the administrations hero-darling-in-exile, now said to have harboured at least one Iranian spy while sourcing many of the distortions and ignoble lies that blew from intelligence agency to intelligence agency to puff up the case for war.
Bushs speech of 24 May illustrated once more that his idea of cooling dissent is to repeat himself, as if only the hard-of-hearing could have failed to get his point the first time. Just so, his trusted staff, especially his jejune on-message press secretary Scott McLellan. But McLellans darting eyes betray a bedrock suspicion that hes been sent out empty-handed to placate a gaggle of newly sceptical journalists.
Just so, the out-of-control talk radio liar Rush Limbaugh has been blathering on to his faithful about what he delicately calls so-called abuse at Abu Ghraib, but theres a desperate ring to his exercises in extenuation. His hard core expects it of him, but the ranks of the pre-convinced are not growing.
Meanwhile, on the rational side of the right, a growing chorus of Republican dissenters is going public with doubts that the administration knows what its doing in Iraq. Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger said in my presence in November 2002 that the Bush team have lost their minds. He wasnt against war but was referring to the slipshod manner in which they made their case(s). Bush I remnants like Lawrence Eagleburger and former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft have been eerily silent recently, but similar language now comes from the likes of Indianas Republican Senator Richard Lugar, head of the Foreign Relations Committee, the columnist George Will, and former Middle East envoy and marine general Anthony Zinni.
Faith in Bushs mastery, even his rationality, let alone his wisdom, is shrinking down to the hardcore of true believers. Polls there the little devils are again! show sizable proportions of Republican voters, up to a quarter in some states, who havent yet made up their minds to vote again for their fearless leader. With every passing day it becomes harder to make the case that the war in Iraq has made America safer.
In this setting, no one can be sure that another al-Qaida & Co. attack in the United States would automatically redound to Bushs political benefit. In the aftermath of 11 September, he covered himself in glory and popular esteem - in substantial part because the attacks seemed to come out of the blue; because he seemed, by turns, calm and (to use the administrations favourite word) resolute; and because a relieved press subdued its doubts, or what ought to have been its doubts, and rallied around him.
Today, the tattoo of investigations have called into question the sky-blueness of that blue the attacks then seemed to come out of. Bush should have gained in plausibility as a war president, but as James Galbraith recently pointed out on salon.com the spikes in his popularity since 11 September have been few and increasingly evanescent. The notion that the Iraq wars success can be measured by the frequency and intensity of attacks on American troops seems outlandish.
As I write, Attorney-General John Ashcroft is on CNN declaring that credible intelligence from many sources suggests al-Qaidas intention to hit the United States hard in the coming months. This does not seem to suggest that the Iraq war, however badly it damaged Americas reputation, was still a luminous success in cauterizing terrorism.
Its fully plausible that the massacre networks of al-Qaida and its replicas and fans are hard at work probing for American vulnerability. Indeed, its the contrary proposition that lacks plausibility. To believe that the occupation of Iraq subtracted from their numbers or weakened their (not a bad word) resolve strains common sense.
We are winning the war on terror, Ashcroft said, but his fidgets and stumbles said something else. Bush is said to be a student of body language. He should see what his chief law enforcement officer is displaying.
FBI director Robert Mueller also appeared to ask for a higher level of vigilance. One might well anticipate that some undecided voters will also be elevating their vigilance in the coming months to focus on the urgent question of whether their current leaders can be trusted to protect them.
