The American Debate: Jaded by lies, public suffers war fatigue

Hey, remember Iraq? Little dustup in the Middle East, launched by President Bush based on false premises, that's now costing this country $3 billion a week? A conflict now on the cusp of its fifth anniversary, which makes it the third-longest in our history, after Vietnam and the Revolutionary War?

We have reached the point where Iraq seems both omnipotent and under the radar. It has wreaked all kinds of havoc on our economy, roiled our relations with allies, and profoundly deepened the ideological divide in our politics - yet polls indicate that most Americans view Iraq as a second-tier issue in the '08 presidential campaign. This would appear to be a contradiction, but I think it is easily explainable.

There is a great temptation to simply tune out the war. That's what happens when people are jaded, exhausted and confused.

We are jaded about the mendacities and duplicities that began during the '02 sales pitch and continue to this day. Last week, for instance, the Pentagon concluded, after sifting 600,000 captured documents and quizzing former Iraqi officials, that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were

not

in cahoots - thereby refuting one of the Bush war team's core claims. The Pentagon at first promised to post the full report online, then reversed itself. Yet the smattering of news stories barely made a ripple.

We are exhausted by the sheer weight of this misbegotten enterprise. We are told that "the surge is working" (as Bush and John McCain frequently intone) whereas, in reality, the military has merely applied a tourniquet to stanch the bleeding. Four million Iraqis have been displaced from their homes, and their fates are unclear. Meanwhile, the dead still pile up daily. In March, an average of 39 Iraqis have been killed each day; last week, at least 12 U.S. soldiers were killed.

But we're too exhausted to keep track; according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, only 28 percent of Americans can identify the number of U.S. military fatalities in Iraq (roughly 4,000); a year ago, 55 percent were tracking the casualties correctly.

And we are confused by what should happen next. The ideological divide between the parties is greater than in any previous war; Pew reports that while 81 percent of Republicans want to keep troops in Iraq, only 27 percent of Democrats agree. But those numbers miss the nuances. A sizable percentage of antiwar Americans worry that a swift troop withdrawal would make matters worse. They would prefer that troops remain until Iraq is deemed to be reasonably stable, but few can agree on what constitutes stability - or what level of troops should be enough.

Nor are the presidential candidates promising light at the end of the tunnel. McCain basically talks about "victory" and a long, indeterminate occupation, yet, in the tradition of the current president, he is vague about what constitutes victory. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton basically talk about withdrawal (Obama has a 16-month pullout timetable; Clinton vows to start pullouts within 60 days), yet both suggest that unforeseen events on the ground could seriously slow our exit. Indeed, Samantha Power, Obama's now-departed foreign-policy adviser, got in trouble for telling the BBC last week that the candidate's antiwar stump rhetoric might be trumped by events in 2009 - further proof that the biggest sin in politics is the uttering of an unscripted truth.

Bush has already boxed in his successor; whoever wins this election will be fated to mop up his historic mess. And I am referring not just to the mess in Iraq - where a Democratic president, in particular, would have to decide, in the mist of a withdrawal process, how many troops should stay behind to keep training the Iraqis, or to guard the new U.S. Embassy, or to staff a terrorist strike force, or to bail out the private contractors flourishing on the taxpayer's dime. I am also referring to the collateral damage Iraq has inflicted on the domestic front, across the board.

Bush has sorely weakened the U.S. economy, and thus limited the candidates' range of policy options. Bush has borrowed much of the money to wage his war, notably from China (thereby giving that burgeoning nation more leverage over us), and those debts have to be repaid with interest. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, puts that tab at $615 billion over the next 10 years. He also writes in his new book: "The war has diverted government expenditures from schools, roads, research, and other areas that would have stimulated the economy in the short run and produced stronger economic growth in the long run," and he notes that the record-high oil prices, "in large measure a consequence of the war," have further weakened the economy.

No wonder so many Americans have been tempted to tune out. It's easy to do. Relatively few of us have been directly touched by tragedy, thanks to the absence of a military draft. Nobody has been called on to directly finance the war, because, in a radical departure from tradition, taxes have not been raised for that purpose. Nobody need worry about seeing the coffins of slain soldiers on TV, because the White House barred camera coverage long ago. Few bother to see the movies that Hollywood has made about Iraq - four tanked at the box office last autumn - because downers don't sell tickets.

This is the emotional landscape on which the '08 campaign is being fought. I think it gives John McCain a fighting chance. Even though Bush and Republicans generally have paid a political price for launching the war and managing it incompetently, McCain - a cheerleader from day one - still looms in the polls as a strong autumn competitor. The reason is simple: Character trumps the issue.

McCain is a potential magnet for many antiwar swing voters because he's perceived as a likable U.S. hero. If people are indeed confused about how to proceed in Iraq, they may well vote from the gut. They may trust that McCain knows best when he insists that the surge is step one toward a brighter tomorrow - as opposed to what they fear most: that the surge is merely a pause on the road to ruin.

It has been said that, in war, truth is often the first casualty. But, with respect to this war without end, it is worse than that. After five years of wasteful bloodshed and diminishing options, we can no longer distinguish the false from the true.