WEB EXCLUSIVE | DERRICK Z. JACKSON
Bush's Iraq illusion pays off in pollsONE BOMBING killed 47 people in Iraq. Decapitated bodies are still being dumped in the streets. More than 200 people died in the last five days in attacks by forces hostile to the American occupation and its puppet Iraqi interim government.
There is yet no sign that this will doom President Bush's bid to stay in the White House. It has been two and a half months since occupation administrator Paul Bremer handed over paper power to the interim government. It has been two and a half months since National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice passed Bush a piece of paper at a NATO summit in Turkey that said ''Iraq is sovereign,'' with Bush writing back to her, ''Let Freedom Reign.'' It has been two and a half months since Bush told the world, ''The Iraqi people have their country back.'' It appears that the simple illusion of giving the Iraqi people ''their country back,'' while still maintaining 138,000 troops there, was a master stroke. In May, a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll found that the percentage of Americans who thought it was worth going to war was at its lowest point, falling from a high of 76 percent during the war to 44 percent. A month later, just before the handover, the same poll found that the percentage of Americans who thought it was a mistake to go to send troops to Iraq was at its highest, 54 percent. Similar feelings were recorded in other polls. A June University of Pennsylvania Annenberg poll found that percentage of Americans who thought the war was worth it was down to 41 percent. A June Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that only 40 percent of Americans thought removing Saddam Hussein was worth the US casualties and cost, down from 53 percent in December. But now, despite the fact that more American soldiers have died since the handover than in the invasion itself, despite the fact that more than 700 Iraqi policemen and recruits have been killed in the last year and a half, and despite the chaos that has the US military still making retaliatory strikes that kill innocent civilians, Bush's numbers on the worth of the war have actually gone up. In the USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll, the percentage of Americans who thought it was worth going to war is up from the 44 percent to 49 percent. The percentage of Americans who thought it was a mistake to send troops to Iraq has fallen from 54 percent down to 38 percent. In the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, the percentage of Americans who thought removing Saddam was worth American lives and busting open the Treasury has crept back up to 43 percent. It is still a far cry from the 76 percent of last year who thought the war was worth it. But Bush's continuing stabilization and upward lift of his political numbers, even as the bodies of Iraqis pile up in the streets and the coffins of American soldiers continue to come home has to be bad news for presidential challenger John Kerry. Kerry has gone to the bank on the notion that his Vietnam service would trump Bush's avoidance of that war. Avoidance works. Bush's handoff of direct responsibility appears to have given him as critical a bounce as when he dropped down onto the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, and declared major combat operations to be over. Back then, some Democrats tried to make a big deal about how staged the event was but Bush continued to ride high in most polls, so high that it was clear that many Democrats still gave him the benefit of the doubt to go to war. Today, no matter how much Kerry carps at Bush's handling of Iraq, it has had negligible effect. The month before the handover, only 42 percent of Americans approved of the overall job Bush was doing as president and 52 percent disapproved in a Newsweek poll. Now, he is back to 48 percent approval and 44 percent disapproval in last week's Newsweek poll. Similarly, he has rebounded in the Associated Press poll from three straight months in the spring of 48 percent approval and 50 percent disapproval to a September rating of 52 percent approval and 46 percent disapproval. On the day of the handover, Bush hailed an Iraq that is ''a world away from the tormented, exhausted, and isolated country we found last year.'' The people over there remain tormented. But Bush has recovered from exhaustion. His poll numbers are increasingly a world away from Iraq, increasingly isolated from the killing.
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com. © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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