For the Iraq war’s opponents, July began as a month of hope. It ended in retreat. It began with Democratic unity in proclaiming the inevitability of American defeat. It ended with respected military analysts--Democrats, no less!--reporting that the situation on the ground had improved, and that the war might be winnable. It began with a plan for a series of votes in Congress that were supposed to stampede nervous Republicans against the continued prosecution of the war. It ended with the GOP spine stiffened, no antiwar legislation passed, and the Democratic Congress adjourning in disarray, with approval ratings lower than President Bush’s. It began with Democratic presidential candidates competing in their antiwar pandering. It ended with them having second thoughts--with Barack Obama, losing ground to Hillary Clinton because he seemed naive about real world threats, frantically suggesting that he would invade Pakistan.
July also began with the liberal media disparaging the troops. It ended with the liberal media in retreat. The New Republic had to acknowledge that its pseudonymous soldier’s account of an incident purportedly showing the dehumanizing effects of the Iraq conflict was a lie: It had taken place in Kuwait (if it happened at all), before this imaginative private ever saw the horrors of war. The New York Times was so shocked to discover in late July that
public opinion hadn’t continued to move against the war that it redid a poll. The answer didn’t change.
If you’re wondering about that New York Times poll just mentioned, Kristol’s got the scoop on that too:
Americans’ support for the initial invasion of Iraq has risen somewhat as the White House has continued to ask the public to reserve judgment about the war until at least the fall. In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted over the weekend, 42 percent of Americans said that looking back, taking military action in Iraq was the right thing to do, while 51 percent said the United States should have stayed out of Iraq. . . . Support for the invasion had been at an all-time low in May, when only 35 percent of Americans said the invasion of Iraq was the right thing and 61 percent said the United States should have stayed out.
In the Times’s view, as explained on its website, this result was “counterintuitive"--so much so that the editors had the poll repeated to see whether they had “gotten it right.” Turns out they had.
As the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto commented: “Well, two cheers for the paper’s diligence, but this also seems to be about as close as we’re going to get to an admission of bias: an acknowledgment that those at the Times are flummoxed that the public is not responding the way they expect to all the bad news they’ve been reporting.”
I often wonder how different the political landscape would be if John Kerry hadn’t decided to make opposition to the war in Iraq the centerpiece of his campaign in 2004, thus prompting the rest of the Democrats to jump on board and tie their political futures to the idea of defeat. How much better off would this country be if the Democrats had nominated Joe Lieberman to be their candidate in 2004, and since then we’d spent our time not rehasing whether or not we should have invaded Iraq or when we should give up but rather different strategies that could lead us to victory there?
Seems to me like we’d all be better off.