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We're Supposed to Support an Unending War? Susan Estrich How dumb do they think we are? By they, I mean President Bush and his White House team. By we, I mean the American people. With his poll numbers literally in the toilet, the president and his team have launched a public relations campaign to build support for the war in Iraq. Countering criticism that the president lives inside a bubble, he's even taking questions, both from the press and from real people. So the president this week went to the City Club in Cleveland and to Wheeling, W.V., and even held a televised press conference, albeit in the morning, not in prime-time. But what Bush has not done is admit that he or his team made any mistakes. Story Continues Below
The only actual news he's made in three days of carefully staged public appearances is to make clear that the war will go on even longer than many of us thought - that it will be the next president, and not Bush, who ends it. Is that supposed to build support? Asked by his longtime press nemesis, Helen Thomas, for the real reason for the war, given that all the stated reasons proved false, the president could do no better than to invoke 9-11. But by now, most Americans have figured out that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden weren't working together, and that al-Qaida didn't come to Iraq until we did. So what's going on? Pure P.R. This isn't about a change in strategy. It isn't about a new message. The president hasn't decided to be frank with the American people, to tell people anything new, to address honestly the concerns people feel. The reasons for his low approval ratings aren't, ultimately, that he hasn't talked enough, but that people don't agree with what they've heard. Even if you accept the basic premise of this war, whatever it was, there is no question that serious mistakes were made in its execution. In "Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq," a new book by Michael R. Gordon and Gen. Bernard E. Trainor, the authors detail a painfully long series of errors and miscommunications, in which military experts were ignored, field commanders overruled and requests for a larger ground force denied. The insurgency we see today was by no means inevitable, the authors argue convincingly, but was the product of our mistakes. While some resistance was inevitable, it would have been far smaller had these mistakes not been made. So what does the president have to say about these charges? Nothing. What does he have to say about the man most responsible for the mistakes, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld? He's doing an excellent job. What would it take in this administration to not be doing an excellent job? How many would have to die for the president to conclude that mistakes had been made and some sort of apology, much less a replacement, was in order? Who knows? This is a president who never sees mistakes, never acknowledges errors and never apologizes. In his last round of speeches and questions and answers, he has stuck to exactly the same script he has been spewing not for months, but for years -- even as the war continues to drag on. The expectation in the White House is that merely seeing and hearing the president saying the same things over and over again will cause people to change their minds. In other words, they think people are stupid. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The one thing a president should do is respect his audience. This president and his team have forgotten that lesson, and it shows.
COPYRIGHT 2006 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
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