Seven More Days: Summer of Discontent

15 August 2005 |permalink | email article

The significance of a pitched tent by an antiwar California mother of a dead soldier near W.’s Texas ranch - political theater aside - is that it symbolizes a genuine angst in the country about the mess in Iraq.

The disenchantment started with the president’s preemptive rush to war, ignoring disagreements almost entirely along ethnic and sectarian lines - and reflecting divisions among Iraq’s Shiite majority and the Sunni and Kurdish minorities - in a nation carved out of the fall of the Ottoman Empire after World War I.

Cindy Sheehan, 48, is criticized as more antiwar protester than grieving mother by conservative pro-war activists for remarks she made when she was among a group of grieving family members who met with the president last year - two months after her son’s death in Baghdad.

First, she told her hometown paper the president seemed sympathetic; later she called him callous. Now she wants a face-to-face on troop withdrawals.

For me, the meaningful part of her protest is that Sheehan’s anger toward Bush increased when it became clear to her both that the U.S. had not found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and evidence that the administration had actively discussed an invasion of Iraq long before the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Bush justified the war by stressing the 9/11 losses, then switched to freedom for the Iraqis when his W.M.D. cover story evaporated. Still later, his administration conceded longtime links between Iraq and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan were exaggerated.

A new USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll last week validates Sheehan’s concerns:

An unprecedented 57% majority say the war has made the U.S. more vulnerable to terrorism.  A new low, 34%, say it has made the country safer. That Bush has long argued that the invasion of Iraq was undertaken to make the nation safer from terrorism , a theory not bought by the public.

About the war’s progress, 56% say the war is going badly; 43% say it is going well. A 54% majority say going to war in Iraq was a mistake, equaling highs measured by the poll last summer when insurgent attacks were increasing. The same proportion say the war was not “worth it,” a viewpoint expressed by a majority since last October.

The climate of discontent will not be eased by the failure of Iraqis to meet a strict American deadline yesterday when it’s hard-line leaders failed to agree to a draft constitution and bought a week to resolve fundamental differences about the fractious desert land’s future.

Critical issues involve the role of Islam in a constitution, the rights of women, sharing the nation’s oil wealth and federalism - granting the Shiites their own semi-autonomous region in the south.

This is crunch time for the commander-in-chief who will have spent more time away from the White House than any president in history by the end of the summer. He again repeated last week that we are at war against global terrorists - that is, it’s better to fight over there than here.

The failure to draft a new constitution on deadline suggested to some critics that the administration has lost control of the process. But Bush praised the “heroic efforts” of negotiators. Condoleezza Rice talked about democracy in action, adding that the final document must guarantee women’s rights - the maximum democratic test in an Islamic culture.

Any serious delay in the constitution-forming process, devised to culminate in democratic elections in December, would could have two negative consequences: strengthening an insurgency and delaying the timetable for a U.S. troop withdrawal as early as next spring - politically key for Bush but far from reality.

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