Pants on fire

Lexington

Nov 17th 2005
From The Economist print edition

Will George Bush succeed in his offensive against critics of the Iraq war?

IT HAS been a mighty long time coming. But finally the administration has hit back at the “Bush-lied-us-into-the-war” crowd. The president has given two vigorous speeches on the subject in the past week—one in Pennsylvania on Veterans' Day and one in Alaska on November 14th. Dick Cheney, Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser, and Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, have backed up his argument. And the White House has even posted a memorandum rebutting a Washington Post article on pre-war intelligence.

The two sides have been skirmishing about George Bush's use of intelligence ever since the fall of Baghdad. Hostilities increased with the death of the 2,000th soldier in Iraq and the indictment of the vice-president's aide, Scooter Libby (who is accused of trying to cover up briefings against a critic of the war that ended up “outing” a spy). Now all-out battle is under way. No sooner had Mr Bush taken a swipe at John Kerry than his old opponent accused Mr Bush of “playing the politics of fear and smear on Veterans' Day”. Both sides now have their war rooms.

The political stakes could hardly be higher. Mr Bush not only risks seeing domestic support for the war crumble further; he risks losing his biggest political asset, his reputation for honesty and integrity. The Democrats risk painting themselves as either opportunists (who turn against a war when it goes badly) or buffoons (too dim to question faulty intelligence when it mattered). They also risk exacerbating their biggest weakness—their reputation for being soft on terrorism and feeble on national security.

So who is getting the best of the argument? Mr Bush starts with one big advantage: the charge that he knew all along that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction seems to be a farrago of nonsense. Nobody has yet produced any solid evidence for this. Sure, Mr Bush made mistakes, but they seem to have been honest ones made for defensible reasons. He genuinely believed that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD—as did most of the world's security services.
And he was not alone in thinking that, after September 11th, America should never again err on the side of complacency. More than 100 Democrats in Congress voted to authorise the war.

But being right and being seen to be right are different things. Mr Bush may not have consciously lied, but, egged on by Mr Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, he made dreadful miscalculations. The WMD never materialised. The Iraqis who were supposed to greet American troops with flowers threw petrol bombs at them instead. You cannot get things so wrong—at a cost of thousands of lives—without paying a political price.

Moreover, Mr Bush clearly entered the debate on Iraq with preconceived ideas that skewed his handling of the intelligence. Those who supported war had to jump over the equivalent of a matchbox while those who advised caution had to leap over a mountain. And some of those preconceived ideas were always false. The Senate Intelligence Committee report suggests that the White House made repeated, if unsuccessful, attempts to persuade the CIA to find links between Saddam and al-Qaeda.

All the signs are that the White House is losing the public relations war. Mr Bush's average approval rating now stands at 37%. The latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found that 63% of people disapprove of his handling of the war in Iraq. These doubts are undermining both his reputation for honesty and his leadership of the wider war on terrorism. The most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows that only 33% of Americans give Mr Bush high marks for being “honest and straightforward”, down from 50% in January, and 57% believe that he “deliberately misled” the nation about the case for war in Iraq. In the Gallup poll, for the first time a plurality of Americans (49%) disapproved of Mr Bush's handling of the war on terror. During the 2004 election campaign Mr Bush relentlessly tied the war in Iraq to the wider war on terrorism (with great success). But now this strategy is misfiring. Doubts about Iraq are depressing support for the wider war on terrorism.

How to turn your best weapon against yourself

This is a disaster for both Mr Bush and the wider Republican coalition. The war on terror was the glue that held this fractious coalition together as well as an acid that ate away at the Democratic Party's credibility and unity. Now the situation is reversed. The Democrats are united behind the “Bush lied” argument—and cock-a-hoop about opinion polls that show they are restoring their traditional lead on “Democratic” subjects like education and Social Security and improving their standing on “Republican” ones like foreign policy and taxation.

At the same time the Republicans are in a tailspin. Most of the party agrees with John McCain's view that “there is an undeniable sense that things are slipping in Iraq”. But conservative America is deeply divided over what to do about this. Mr McCain believes in sending another 10,000 troops. But on November 15th, Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, and John Warner, of Virginia, easily pushed through an amendment calling for Iraqi forces to take the lead in providing security next year and urging Mr Bush to lay out his strategy for ending the war.

All presidencies get the blues. But John Kenneth White, a professor at the Catholic University of America, makes a point that ought to deepen the White House's mood of despair. The difference between presidents who can shake off the blues and those who can't comes down to one thing: their ability to change the subject. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both succeeded in changing the subject. Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George Bush senior all failed to do so.

Mr Bush is forever being forced to debate the same damn subject—his decision to go to war in Iraq. And each time he debates it, a bigger chunk of the audience turns against him.

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