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Published on Monday, November 21, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Losing the Fear Factor: How The Bush Administration Got Spooked
by Tom Engelhardt

It's finally Wizard of Oz time in America. You know -- that moment
when the curtains are pulled back, the fearsome-looking wizard wreathed in
all that billowing smoke turns out to be some pitiful little guy, and
everybody looks around sheepishly, wondering why they acted as they did for
so long.

Starting on September 11, 2001 -- with a monstrous helping hand from
Osama bin Laden -- the Bush administration played the fear card with
unbelievable effectiveness. For years, with its companion "war on terror,"
it trumped every other card in the American political deck. With an absurd
system for color-coding dangers to Americans, the President, Vice President,
and the highest officials in this land were able to paint the media a "high"
incendiary orange and the Democrats an "elevated" bright yellow,
functionally sidelining them.

How stunningly in recent weeks the landscape has altered -- almost
like your basic hurricane sweeping through some unprotected and unprepared
city. Now, to their amazement, Bush administration officials find themselves
thrust through the equivalent of a Star-Trekkian wormhole into an
anti-universe where everything that once worked for them seems to work
against them. As always, in the face of domestic challenge, they have
responded by attacking -- a tactic that was effective for years. The
President, Vice President, National Security Adviser, and others have ramped
up their assaults, functionally accusing Democratic critics of little short
of treason -- of essentially undermining American forces in the field, if
not offering aid and comfort to the enemy. On his recent trip to Asia, the
President put it almost as bluntly as his Vice President did at home: "As
our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life,
they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them into
war continue to stand behind them." The Democrats were, he said over and
over, "irresponsible" in their attacks. *** Cheney called them spineless
"opportunists" peddling dishonestly for political advantage.

But instead of watching the Democrats fall silent under assault as
they have for years, they unexpectedly found themselves facing a roiling
oppositional hubbub threatening the unity of their own congressional party.
In his sudden, heartfelt attack on Bush administration Iraq plans ("a flawed
policy wrapped in illusion") and his call for a six-month timetable for
American troop withdrawal, Democratic congressional hawk John Murtha took on
the Republicans over their attacks more directly than any mainstream
Democrat has ever done. ("I like guys who've never been there that criticize
us who've been there. I like that. I like guys who got five deferments and
never been there and send people to war, and then don't like to hear
suggestions about what needs to be done. I resent the fact, on Veterans Day,
he [Bush] criticized Democrats for criticizing them.") Perhaps more
important, as an ex-Marine and decorated Vietnam veteran clearly speaking
for a military constituency (and possibility some Pentagon brass), he gave
far milder and more "liberal" Democrats cover.

For the first time since the war in Iraq began, "tipping points,"
constantly announced in Iraq but never quite in sight, have headed for home.
Dan Bartlett, counselor to the President and drafter of recent Presidential
attacks on the Democrats, told David Sanger of the New York Times that
"Bush's decision to fight back. arose after he became concerned the [Iraq]
debate was now at a tipping point"; while Howard Fineman of Newsweek dubbed
Murtha himself a "one-man tipping point."

Something indeed did seem to tip, for when the White House and
associates took Murtha on, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, and other Democrats
leaped aggressively to his defense. In fact, something quite unimaginable
even a few days earlier occurred. When Republican Rep. Jean Schmidt of Ohio,
the most junior member of the House, accused Murtha (via an unnamed Marine
colonel supposedly from her district) of being a coward, Democratic
Representative Harold Ford from Tennessee "charged across the chamber's
center aisle to the Republican side screaming that Ms. Schmidts's attack had
been unwarranted. 'You guys are pathetic!' yelled Representative Martin
Meehan, Democrat of Massachusetts. 'Pathetic.'"

There could, however, be no greater sign of a politically changed
landscape than the decision of former President Bill Clinton (who
practically had himself adopted into the Bush family over the last year) to
tell a group of Arab students in Dubai only two-and-a-half years late that
the Iraqi invasion was a "big mistake." Since he is undoubtedly a stalking
horse for his wife, that great, cautious ship-of-nonstate, the Hillary
Clinton presidential campaign, should soon turn its prow ever so slowly to
catch the oppositional winds.)

If you want to wet an index finger yourself and hoist it airwards to
see which way the winds are blowing, then just check out how the media has
been framing in headlines the recent spate of administration attacks.
Headline writing is a curious in-house craft -- and well worth following.
Changing headline language is a good signal that something's up. When the
President attacks, it's now commonly said that he's "lashing out" -- an
image of emotional disarray distinctly at odds with the once powerful sense
of the Bush administration as the most disciplined White House on record and
of the President and Vice President as resolutely unflappable. Here's just a
small sampling:

The Miami Herald, "President lashes out at critics of Iraq war"; the
Associated Press, Cheney Latest to Lash Out at Critics; the Buffalo News,
Bush lashes out at war critics; even the Voice of America, Bush Lashes Out
at Political Opponents Over Iraq Accusations.

In other headlines last week, the administration was presented in
post-Oz style as beleaguered, under siege, and powerless to control its own
fate: The Associated Press, for example, headlined a recent Jennifer Loven
piece, Iraq War Criticism Stalks Bush Overseas; the New York Times, a David
Sanger report, Iraq Dogs President as He Crosses Asia to Promote Trade; and
CNN headlined the Murtha events, A hawk rattles GOP's cage.

The language used in such recent press accounts was no less revealing.
Sanger, for example, began his piece this way:

"President Bush may have come to Asia determined to show leaders
here that his agenda is far broader than Iraq and terrorism, but at every
stop, and every day, Mr. Bush and his aides have been fighting a rearguard
action to justify how the United States got into Iraq and how to get out."

While Loven launched hers with, "His war policies under siege at
home.," attributing the siege atmosphere and the Bush "counterattack" to
"the president's newly aggressive war critics."
Lashing out, stalked, dogged, under siege, counterattacking, fighting
a rearguard action -- let's not just attribute this to "newly aggressive war
critics." It's a long-coming shift in the zeitgeist, as evident in the media
as in the halls of Congress.

On Thursday, for instance, ABC prime-time TV news, which led with a
story on the President "lashing out" at critics, then offered a long,
up-close-and-personal segment in which a teary-eyed Murtha spoke of the
war-wounded he's regularly visited at hospitals and the fraudulence of
administration policy. That same night, another prime-time news broadcast
turned the President's claim that the Democrats were "irresponsible" in
their criticisms into a montage of Bush repeatedly saying "irresponsible" in
different poses -- so many times in a row, in fact, that the segment could
easily have come from a sharp opening sequence on Jon Stewart's The Daily
Show.

None of this would have been possible even weeks ago in a country
where it was once gospel that you don't attack a president while he's
representing the United States abroad. That's why, in the Watergate era,
Richard Nixon had such a propensity for trips overseas and undoubtedly why
our stay-at-home President's handlers decided to turn him into a Latin
American and Asian globetrotter. The question is: How did this happen? What
changed the zeitgeist and where are we heading?

Poll-driven Politics

Polls are, it might be said, what's left of American democracy.
Privately run, often for profit or advantage, they nonetheless are as close
as we come these days -- actual elections being what they are -- to the
expression of democratic opinion, serially, week after week. Everyone who
matters in and out of Washington and in the media reads them as if life
itself were at stake. They drive behavior and politics. Fear, too, is a
poll-driven phenomenon. Not surprisingly then, it was the moment late last
spring when presidential approval ratings fell decisively below the 50% mark
and looked to be heading for 40%, that the White House took anxious note and
so, no less important, did a previously cowed media. Somewhere in that
period, the fear factor, right in the administration's hands, was
transformed into a feeling fearful factor. As I've written elsewhere, faced
with the mother of a dead soldier on their doorstep, all the President's men
blinked and the Camp Casey fiasco followed. Soon after, before hurricane
Cindy could even blow out of town, hurricane Katrina blew in and the
President's ratings headed for freefall. In just the last month, they look
as if they had been shoved over a small cliff, dipping in the latest Harris
and Wall Street Journal polls to an almost unheard of 34% (only five points
above Richard Nixon's at his Watergate nadir).

The poll numbers which once gave the administration's fear factor
meaning have simply evaporated -- as have any figures which might indicate
that this administration is capable of staunching its own wounds.
Emboldening media and political opposition in Washington, such figures give
Murtha-like cover to behavior that not long ago would have been unthinkable.
A record 60% of Americans surveyed in the most recent USA Today poll,
including one in four Republicans, said "the war wasn't 'worth it.' One in
five Republicans said the invasion of Iraq was a mistake." Those who felt
things were "going well" for the country as a whole dropped nine percentage
points in a month.

Democrats long ago fled the ranks of presidential supporters, as more
recently have independents; now moderate Republicans are beginning to peel
away too. According to Tom Raum of the Associated Press,"[Bush's] approval
on handling Iraq fell from 87 percent among all Republicans in November 2004
to 78 percent this month. Among Republican women, from 88 percent a year ago
to 73 percent now. Among independents, approval on Iraq fell from 49 percent
in November 2004 to 33 percent now." If you want a figure that, from the
administration's viewpoint, offers a frightening glimpse into a possible
future, consider the 79% of Americans who believe I. Lewis Libby's
indictment is "of importance to the nation"; this, despite Republican claims
that the grounds for indicting were insignificant, and a new Libby defense
fund made up of Republican high-rollers and assorted neocons.

In other words, replace the still emotionally charged issues of the
war in Iraq and the President's actions, where, at 34%-40%, a bedrock base
of support remains more or less intact, with a less charged
ethics-in-government issue and that vaunted Rock of Gibraltar shatters. This
is the previously inconceivable future so many Republican politicians
suddenly fear.

Just for the heck of it, throw in another factor -- "intensity" -- and
you have an even more volatile picture, given the lack of positive,
potentially mobilizing news on the domestic and foreign horizons. E.J.
Dionne of the Washington Post suggests that the polling figures are even
worse than they look because intensity of feeling on the war issue is now
"on the side of the war's opponents." He adds:

"The findings on the strength of feelings about the war were matched
by the intensity of feelings about Bush himself: Only 20 percent of those
surveyed said they strongly approved of the overall job Bush was doing,
while 47 percent strongly disapproved. A president who has always played to
his base finds that his base is steadily shrinking."

In other words, doubt and demoralization are setting in -- a political
rot that can do untold damage. Given how many independents and moderate
Republicans who once supported the war have changed their minds, the
scathing attacks on Democrats for mind-changing on the war may not prove a
winning strategy either. They may, as Raum comments, "backfire on
Republicans."
But here's a question: Can we trace Bush's polling near-collapse to
its origins anywhere? In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine under
the eerie title, "The Iraq Syndrome" (subscription only), John Mueller, an
expert on how wars affect presidencies, offers a canny, cool-eyed
interpretation of changing American opinion on Iraq. He tracks polling data
on the three sustained wars -- Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq -- the U.S. has
fought in the last half-century-plus where we took more than 300 casualties.

All three show approximately the same polling pattern: broad
enthusiasm at the outset, a relatively quick and steep falloff in support,
followed by steady erosion thereafter from which no long-term presidential
recovery seems possible (certainly not via heightened rhetoric). In all
three wars, as support fell, pro-withdrawal sentiment rose. Though some
experts link this pattern to an American "defeat-phobia," Mueller points out
that, in cases like Lebanon in the Reagan years and Somalia in the Clinton
era, Americans have been quite capable of swallowing withdrawal and defeat
(of a sort) without making the presidents involved pay any significant
political cost.

The crucial factor in loss of support for each of these wars, Mueller
insists, is a growing casualty list and not just any casualties either --
only American ones. (The fact that "vastly more" Iraqis have died than all
the victims of "all international terrorists in all of history" matters
little, he observes, in American popular judgments on the war.) What makes
Iraq stand out in this list of three "is how much more quickly support has
eroded in the case of Iraq. By early 2005, when combat deaths were around
1,500, the percentage of respondents who considered the Iraq war a
mistake -- over half -- was about the same as the percentage who considered
the war in Vietnam a mistake at the time of the 1968 Tet offensive, when
nearly 20,000 soldiers had already died."

If Mueller's right, then the steady drip of American casualties --
many less dead and many more wounded than in Korea and Vietnam, in part
because of improved medical care and triage techniques -- has seeped deeply
into American consciousness. This seems so, despite the administration's
careful attempt to keep returning bodies and individual funerals out of
sight and so out of mind; despite the fact that the American dead -- 60
soldiers in the first 19 days of October -- have largely been kept off the
front-pages of American papers and photos of dead Americans off television
(where dead Iraqis can regularly be seen). Short of massive draw-downs of
American forces in Iraq, there is no casualty end in sight for this
administration; and drawing down ground forces (while substituting air power
for them), as Richard Nixon learned in his "Vietnamization" program, only
solves a home-front problem at the cost of creating staggering problems on
the war front.

For an administration still fighting "withdrawal" with all its
strength, this may prove a problem with no exit -- further casualties acting
as a motor propelling the unhappiness that changes more minds and pushes
falling polling figures ever downward, propelling unease about the country
which only leads to escalating casualty figures of another kind -- those
growing defections from the ranks of your core political supporters.

When Agendas Go Bump in the Night

To put the present crisis in some perspective, you could say that two
central agendas of the Bush administration proved to be in conflict,
although for years this was less than evident (even to the players
involved). There was the long-planned neoconservative drive to invade Iraq
and, through that act, begin to remake the Middle East. The neocons were
backed in this by Vice President Cheney and his crew in the
vice-presidential office as well as allied figures like John Bolton, Stephen
Hadley, and (some of the time) Donald Rumsfeld, none of whom were
necessarily neocons. The motives this disparate group held for remaking the
region in their image ranged from the urge to establish a planetary,
militarily enforced Pax Americana and/or an urge to control the oil
heartlands of the planet to a desire -- from the Likudniks in the
administration -- to secure the region for an ascendant Sharonista Israel.

Whatever the overlapping motivations, at the heart of this policy lay
an urge to unleash a Constitutionally unfettered "war president" on the
world. (Torture was a crucial issue in all of this largely because, once
established as an essential tool of the war on terror, it would be proof
beyond a shadow of a doubt that George Bush's presidency had been freed of
all restraints.) Put into full effect on March 20, 2003, when the "war on
terror" melded into an invasion of Iraq, the policy was meant to place in
the President's hands every global lever of power that mattered for all
time.

It now seems far clearer that the endless fallout from the fatal
decision to invade Iraq is eating away at another agenda entirely, one that
emerged from the domestic political wing of this administration -- from Karl
Rove, Andrew Card, Tom DeLay and their ilk. This was the Republican desire
to nail down the country as a purely red (as in red-meat) Republican land.
The vetting of the K-Street lobbying crowd, the increasing control over the
flow of corporate dollars into politics, the gerrymandering of congressional
districts to create an election-proof House of Representatives, the
mobilization of a religious base dedicated to an endless set of culture
wars, the ushering in of a right-wing Supreme Court, and so many other
activities were all meant to create an impregnable Republican Party in
control of every lever of power in our country into an endless future.

The unfettered, imperial President and the unfettered, imperial
Republican Party were joined at the hip by the attacks of September 11,
2001, which led to both the "war on terror" abroad and the Patriot Act and
the Homeland Security Department domestically. Had the Bush administration
pursued both agendas, minus an invasion of Iraq, the two might have remained
joined far longer. The crucial invasion decision, made almost immediately by
the neocon war party backed by the President, was supported by White House
Chief of Staff Andrew (""From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce
new products in August") Card and Karl ("the architect") Rove, both of whom
believed that a good war, well promoted and correctly wielded domestically,
might drive a Republican agenda to eternal domination in America. None of
them expected that it would prove to be the wedge driven between the two
agendas.

The first hint of this was caught perfectly in a classic headline: On
May 2, 2003, George Bush co-piloted an Air Force jet onto the deck of the
USS Abraham Lincoln (carefully kept thirty miles out of its San Diego
homeport so that the President could have his "top gun" photo op instead of
climbing a gangplank like any normal being). Following this "historic
landing," he stepped up to an on-deck podium where, under a White House
banner that read "Mission Accomplished," he declared that "major combat
operations in Iraq have ended." This was clearly meant to be the stunning
start of the President's campaign for reelection in 2004, a classic piece of
Rovian image manipulation and a nail in the coffin of the Democratic Party.
And so it seemed to most at the time.

But if you revisit the CNN story about the landing and speech,
headlined "Bush calls end to 'major combat,'" it's hard now not to note the
subhead lurking just under it: U.S. Central Command: Seven hurt in Fallujah
grenade attack. Seven wounded American soldiers -- that really says it all.
The photo-op that was meant for the reelection campaign was already being
undermined by another story; two policies yoked together were already
pulling in different directions. Our present moment was already being born,
unnoticed but in plain sight.

Now both agendas are in disarray with no help whatsoever on the
horizon. Imagine, for instance, that the South Koreans timed the
announcement of the withdrawal of the first of their troops from (Kurdish)
northern Iraq for the moment the President arrived in their country. Imagine
that Tony Blair's people are now said to be perfecting total withdrawal
plans for next year, and that the President recently may have had to slap
down the top American general in Iraq for suggesting withdrawal (or at least
drawdown) plans of his own. Imagine that various European nations are now
investigating (or in the case of an Italian court charging) American agents
in the war on terror with crimes. Imagine that the President, who often
insisted Saddam had been overthrown to rid Iraq of its torture chambers
("the torture chambers and the secret police are gone forever") and to end
the reign of a "murderous tyrant who. used chemical weapons to kill
thousands of people," now faces a "tip-of-the-iceberg" torture scandal in
Iraq involving the people we've brought to power and another spreading
scandal about the American use of a chemical-like weapon, white phosphorous,
on civilians in the city of Fallujah. Imagine that we proved less capable
than Saddam of delivering basics like electricity and potable water to the
people of Iraq, that we squandered billions of taxpayer dollars in
"reconstruction" funds there, and that we face an insurgency which continues
to grow and spread in opposition to a shabby elected government all but in
league with the Iranians. Imagine that the President's Iraq War is now
devouring his presidency and that it can only get worse.

The Middle East is a sea of political gasoline just waiting for the
odd administration match or two; American foreign policy is in a kind of
disarray for which even the final days of Vietnam offer no comparison; while
at home, the DeLay, Frist, Libby, and Abramoff scandals (and associated
indictments) can only grow and spread. Special Counsel Fitzgerald has just
announced his decision to empanel a new grand jury, sure to drive the Plame
scandal ever deeper and higher into the administration and ever closer to
the 2006 elections or possibly beyond. It would be easy to go on, but you
get the idea.

It is a truism of American politics that voters are almost never
driven to the polls by foreign policy. In this case, however, the war in
Iraq has chased the President and his men ever since he landed on that
carrier deck. How little he knew what he was asking for when, in a moment of
bravado, he said of the Iraqi insurgents, "Bring 'em on." He just barely
beat the erosive effects of his war to the polls in November 2004. Now, it
continues to eat inexorably into the heartland of Republican political
domination. Even Republican discipline in Congress -- without the Hammer's
hammer -- has disintegrated under the heat of the war. As Chris Nelson wrote
recently in his Washington insider's newsletter, The Nelson Report:

"The stunning swiftness of the bipartisan Congressional collapse of
support for the Administration's conduct of the war in Iraq, and by
extension the entire anti-terrorism effort, is such that it has not been
fully appreciated by the 'leadership' of either party. That's the real
meaning of a Senate vote which Republicans tried to spin into a victory for
the President, because they avoided the Democrat's amendment to set
performance-based withdrawal deadlines."

Now, the war threatens to crack open the Republican base and chase the
dream of a single-party Republican political future -- only recently so
close -- right off the map. No wonder the Democrats have just come out
swinging (sort of). The political shock and awe the administration so
regularly deployed after Sept. 11, 2001 no longer works. The Democrats
suddenly have discovered that -- no thanks to them -- the American people
are somewhere else and they have little to fear from George Bush or ***
Cheney. No Presidential "counterattack," no "lashing out," no set of
speeches or new agenda (to be announced in the 2006 State of the Union
Address or anywhere else) is likely to change any of this for the better for
this President. Fear is no longer on the Bush administration's side. No
wonder they're now afraid -- very, very afraid.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a
regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the
American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a
history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days
of Publishing, has just come out in paperback.

© 2005 Tom Engelhardt

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