The AP’s Tom Raum has now made it journalistically official:
President Bush keeps revising his explanation for why the U.S. is in Iraq, moving from narrow military objectives at first to history-of-civilization stakes now.
Initially, the rationale was specific: to stop Saddam Hussein from using what Bush claimed were the Iraqi leader’s weapons of mass destruction or from selling them to al-Qaida or other terrorist groups.
But 3 1/2 years later, with no weapons found, still no end in sight and the war a liability for nearly all Republicans on the ballot Nov. 7, the justification has become far broader and now includes the expansive “struggle between good and evil.
Question: how many Republicans would have easily gone along with the war plans if at the time it had simply been pitched as a chapter in the struggle between good and evil? How many Democrats would have gone along? We know Rush and Sean would have gone along with it — but to get any form of Congressional approval, the rationale had to be bigger than just The Good Guys against The Bad Guys, as accurate as that description may be. MORE:
Republicans seized on North Korea’s reported nuclear test last week as further evidence that the need for strong U.S. leadership extends beyond Iraq.
Bush’s changing rhetoric reflects increasing administration efforts to tie the war, increasingly unpopular at home, with the global fight against terrorism, still the president’s strongest suit politically.
This isn’t a small matter. Historians and documentary producers are going to have a field day when this administration leaves office. All they have to do is to string together some of the mountainous news and interview show footage of administration big wigs giving one rationale, then denying that it was ever given. And then string together footage of the different kinds of rationales.
They’ve now broken the record held by the Johnson administration: it generally gave one rationale for the war that was eventually rejected by the American people.
There are many reasons why this current war is steadily losing support. An underlying reason is the shifting explanations factor. People who originally supported the war for X and Y reason now feel snookered — as if they have been part of a gullible audience in a political shell game. And when they feel that way it’s a blow to the administration’s general credibility on future pronouncements.
The blow is even bigger because each time the administration tries a new justification it seemingly discards or downplays the previous one that didn’t shore up support. PS to Tony Snow and Karl Rove: most Americans do remember what was said before — particularly if they gave the administration the benefit of the doubt and accepted earlier justifications.
Yet another reason may be a shift in the conventional wisdom. The new Bob Woodward book
(which portrays a closed-minded almost dysfunctional admininstration headed by President who asserts policy more than he thinks about it) got incredible press coverage and is flying of the shelves at bookstores. A top British general said Great Britain should get out of Iraq (after the predictable controversy he tempered those remarks). Leaks from the upcoming Jim Baker-led bipartisan commission on Iraq indicate its recommendations won’t fit in with GWB’s pledge of staying there until the U.S. is victorious and it will suggest a — here comes that dirty word to some — middle path.
The underlying conventional wisdom shift has been on whether the war was worth getting into and is worth pursuing…let alone worth pursuing to victory.
Can the administration turn this around now? That will be difficult.
What can the administration do now? Offer another new justification?
A DIFFERENT VIEW: Red State disagrees and says Raum “doesn’t get it.”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.