A rchive Date
[ 06-12-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
|
[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/cornies_dec6.html
U.S. Iraq policy facing tougher questions at home
LARRY CORNIES, London Free Press
2003-12-06
WASHINGTON, D.C. - At the height of the Vietnam war in the 1960s, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite went there to report firsthand on the conflict that was robbing America of its young people and driving an ideological wedge into the nation.
What he discovered was that, despite the government's most strident arguments, the war was unwinnable. He said as much - over the objections of his bosses - in his final instalment from that war-torn country.
U.S. president Lyndon Johnson reportedly said afterward, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."
Within weeks, Johnson announced he would not seek re-election. Cronkite's frank assessment was one reason he came to be regarded as "the most trusted man in America."
President George W. Bush will not give up his pursuit of a second term - something his father never had.
But if a gathering of newspaper opinion editors here this week is indicative, he is already perilously close to losing middle America on the war in Iraq, especially on the merits of its connection to the so-called war on terror.
I've spent the better part of the past week here in the U.S. capital, along with two dozen of my counterparts from American newspapers and journalists from as far away as New Zealand.
What has been most remarkable among the many briefings by think-tank types, U.S. Homeland Security bosses, intelligence experts and defence department officials isn't what each of them has to say about terrorism, security, Afghanistan and Iraq, but the extent to which opinion-makers at American newspapers have dug in their heels against it all.
If they represent middle America (and they may not), the Bush administration has lost them.
I would have anticipated this reaction from most Canadian journalists and editors at newspapers from many other western countries.
But the increasing resentment among normally conservative and patriotic American opinion-page editors over Bush's justification for waging war in Iraq as part of a global strategy against terrorism is remarkable. A tide is turning.
"We don't like to be lied to," said Lynnell Burkett, editorial page editor at the San Antonio Express-News, deep in the heart of Bush country. Her sentiments are echoed, almost word for word, by Harry Austin, editorial page editor at the Chattanooga (Tenn.) Times Free Press. Ask others and you get similar answers.
They're hearing from their readers, of course. Burkett talks about the pride her fellow Texans felt when U.S. troops first departed army and air force bases for Iraq, believing the connections between Saddam Hussein's regime to global terrorism, his alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and the yearning among Iraqis to be liberated from his tyranny were as irrefutable as Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentations to the UN Security Council and Bush's speech there this year.
But it turns out they were - refutable, that is.
And in the intervening months, absent any evidence of WMD, Burkett has watched the pride of her readers turn to disappointment, anxiety and anger.
The seminars here were cold comfort. Notwithstanding meetings at the Pentagon, where Brig. Gen. Vince Brooks was adamant about winning the war on terror, where Under-Secretary of Defence for Intelligence Stephen Cambone spoke in circles about not knowing what is not known, and where Under-Secretary for Defense Policy Douglas Feith called the war in Iraq a "pre-cooked meal" heated up by the microwaves of Sept. 11, 2001, evidence of any progress on solving the puzzles of terrorism in North America and abroad was largely elusive or absent.
A former CIA operative, who spoke on the condition the comments wouldn't be attributed, described the newly created Homeland Security department as being paralysed by bureaucratic turf wars, a leftover Cold War mentality, information clogs and "a disaster" in terms of oversight.
Lawrence Korb, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, recently returned from a fact-finding trip to Iraq, spoke of the confused conflict within the minds of young soldiers flying Black Hawk helicopters over the countryside, with one hand on their machine-gun triggers, yet being ordered also to wave in friendly fashion to Iraqis below.
Most insightful, perhaps, was Brookings Institution visiting scholar Muqtedar Khan, who worried about "representation to history and to the future" of U.S. foreign policy as expressed through the Iraq war.
His concern was not only about losing "middle America" in the present, but also for future generations.
Larry Cornies is Editor of The London Free Press. His column appears Saturdays. He can be e-mailed at lcornies@lfpress.com. Copyright © The London Free Press 2001,2002,2003
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
|