Between the Thanksgiving weekend in late November and the end of the year is the moment when politicians in the United States start to focus on the following Novembers congressional elections, reading both national polls and private opinion surveys with especial attention. This time, for Republicans who did well in 2004 and are seeking re-election, the news is grim: the donors are sending a clear message of concern about Iraq and of a broader disillusion with the second presidential term of George W Bush.
Bush himself now has the lowest ratings of his presidency, while the man credited with the overall strategy of the administration, vice-president Dick Cheney, has seen his popularity rating fall from over 60% in 2001 to 36% in November 2005. A majority of 1,006 voters surveyed last month on their rating of Cheneys advice to the president judged it as bad.
Also in openDemocracy every week since October 2001, Paul Rogers writes a column tracking the major events in the war on terror from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond.
Paul Rogerss latest column, an analysis of the strategy to win the war advocated by neo-conservative thinkers in the Weekly Standard, is Victory in Iraq (15 December 2005)
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The message is clear: one year into his second term, George W Bush has lost, perhaps for ever, the support of much of the American people, of the Republican Party funders and of parts of congress. For this there are several reasons:
- the scandal over the leaked name of CIA operative Valerie Plame which has led to the indictment of Cheneys chief-of-staff I Lewis Scooter Libby and may yet catch Bushs adviser Karl Rove
- the incompetence, negligence and corruption associated with the Katrina disaster in Louisiana
- the growing revolt of congress over renewal of anti-terrorism legislation and the use of torture
- White House authorisation of torture in US detention centres
- the apparent stalling of the originally ambitious, flagship, plans to reform social security
- the price of petrol at the consumer pump.
It is, however, above all Iraq which has turned the tide of public support so quickly. This is not so much connected to the false prospectus on which the country entered the war, nor even of false linkage of between the misnamed war on terror with the desire articulated long before 11 September 2001 by neo-conservatives to overthrow the Baathist regime in Baghdad.
The real issue is the state of the US armed forces and, in particular, the high cost in dead and wounded which the war has led to. Despite the best efforts of the US government to limit public perception of its impact, a very different message has now registered: the war is unwinnable, US forces are now the targets, equipment is lacking, the forces on the ground are demoralised.
An unlikely nemesis
The establishment bearer of this grim message was an unlikely personage: the 73-year old Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, John Murtha, who rose from his back bench in the corner of the House of Representatives on Thursday 17 November to deliver a blistering, pithy and calm denunciation of the Bush strategy in Iraq.
The normally reserved Murtha is one of the best friends of the US military in congress: a veteran of the US marines decorated in Vietnam who was among eighty Democrats who voted for the 2003 war. But his own experience in Iraq, where he heard the views of the troops and observed the inadequacy of armoured vehicles and body armour, and his regular visits to the military hospitals themselves, places George Bush was not seen visiting, convinced him to change his mind. He concluded by saying that the US should leave Iraq as soon as possible after the 15 December legislative elections.
Amidst a debate marked by endless sanctimonious evocations of patriotism and egregious listing of the war record of some congressmen, Murthas opponents tried to beat him down, with epithets ranging from nay-sayer to coward. But Murtha spoke for much of the US public in what he said, since they too are now seeing the wounded returning and hearing the stories they tell.
Also in openDemocracy on United States policy, Iraq, and the war on terror:
John J Mearsheimer, Hans Morgenthau and the Iraq war: realism versus neo-conservatism (May 2005)
Godfrey Hodgson, Oil and American politics (October 2005)
Robert W Snyder, To Iraq and back with the National Guard (October 2004)
Sidney Blumenthal, George W Bush: home alone (October 2005)
Sidney Blumenthal, Condoleezza Rices troubling journey (December 2005)
Isabel Hilton, From Vietnam to Iraq: Daniel Ellsberg interviewed (December 2005)
The statistics for army recruitment in 2005 tell their own tale of falling popular support: in the midst of the most intense recruiting campaign since the Vietnam war of the 1970s the military have failed to staff fully 41% of its combat and non-combat specialities. In key areas including special-forces soldiers, intelligence specialists and translators the army has recruited as little as one third of their targets.
In the past two years the army and marines have fallen 20% short of their goals for roadside defusers a key weakness given the use of roadside bombs in Iraq. The national guard is failing to get its quota of tank crews and artillery specialists. In sum, with slumping morale in Iraq and chronic recruitment failures at home, the all-volunteer army is failing to meet US goals: and this was an administration which began life talking about the US being able to fight two and a half wars across the world simultaneously.
Declare victory, then go home
There is an accumulating sense of a beleaguered, isolated White House. Dick Cheney pressed the case for a continued involvement at the American Enterprise Institute on 21 November, where he once worked: but despite the choice of a guaranteed friendly audience, he allowed no questions and appeared tense and nervous throughout. George W Bush himself chose another safe venue, the naval academy at Annapolis, to set out his National Strategy for Victory and to reject calls for a timetable for withdrawal.
The administrations response is to try to talk about what they see as positive developments in Iraq, and to pin hopes on a stronger Iraqi army able to take over as US forces redeploy to fortified barracks (that is, retreat from the battlefield). The Iraqi elections are seen as key to this Bush strategy. But the redeployment policy is basically one of retreat from active engagement with the opposition forces, opponents whom the US military claim are even harder to engage with than the guerrillas in Vietnam because of their fragmentation into myriad, decentralised, groups.
The proposed Iraqi redeployment is all too reminiscent, not least to Arab observers, of the outcome in Lebanon in 1983-1984 when, after suffering hundreds of losses in Hizbollah attacks on their barracks, US forces redeployed on ships: the ships then sailed away.
Fred Hallidays global politics column on openDemocracy surveys the national histories, geopolitical currents, and dominant ideas across the world. The articles include:
America and Arabia after Saddam (May 2004)
Terrorism and world politics: conditions and prospects (March 2005)
An encounter with Mr X (March 2005)
Irans revolutionary spasm (July 2005)
Political killing in the cold war (August 2005)
Maxime Rodinson: in praise of a marginal man (September 2005)
A transnational umma: myth or reality? (October 2005)
The Barcelona process: ten years on (November 2005)
The overall strategy is clear enough declare victory, then go home, in the words of the former senator for Vermont, George Aiken (and made famous by the anti-war senator and challenger to Richard Nixon in 1972, George McGovern). The problem with this is that everyone from the guerrilla opposition, to Iraqi politicians legitimately and courageously engaged in the constitutional process, to the ever more anxious and engaged neighbouring states knows that the US is now on the run.
At a recent conference in London attended by normally pro-US Arab officials, no Arab I spoke to believed the US could hold it in Iraq, all the more so as US diplomats had already visited their country enquiring how they could declare victory, and then withdraw.
The end of 2005 may, in retrospect, turn out to be that moment when the whole neo-conservative strategy in Iraq, and indeed in the greater middle east as a whole, came unstuck an equivalent to the Anglo-French debacle in Suez in 1956.
Many analogies are being made with Vietnam, but it is perhaps the analogy with the Soviet war in Afghanistan which is most telling. When the Soviets sent the Red army into Kabul in 1979 they sought to limit the political and economic costs by restricting numbers to around 120,000 i.e. to that necessary to garrison the major towns: hence the official term limited contingent for their troops in that country over the following ten years.
The US in Iraq has faced a similar problem, in that it has not been able to commit the full level of forces it could and which was necessary effectively to control the country. Those limits have now had their own consequences in a US force increasingly restricted and vulnerable, without adequate local counterparts, and with almost no significant intelligence on enemy plans and dispositions.
The reply of the Iraqi guerrillas to Bushs Annapolis speech on 30 November was incontestable: with a lightly-armed unit, and recorded by video cameras, they took control of an important Sunni town, Ramadi, and held it for several hours; a few days later, and also observed by video, they attacked a US patrol and killed ten of its members. Bush, Cheney and the US army have by now realised they are in an unwinnable situation: how long it takes them to act on this remains to be seen.
It could be a very lonely thirty-six months for Bush as he ekes out his second, now embattled and perhaps terminally discredited presidential term. One leading US realist thinker put it to me that this should not bother America too much in the long run: it is such a powerful country that it will survive and its economy continue to grow. The price will be paid in Iraq, and more broadly in the middle east, where extreme Sunni militancy will feel emboldened, as it did by Afghanistan. This may continue long after the US limited contingent has departed.
