BY DOUG LORIMER
Disaffection is growing in the United States as an increasing number of people realise they were conned by the propaganda of US President George Bush's administration — which was uncritically parroted by the US corporate media — into supporting Washington's military occupation of Iraq.
According to a Zogby International opinion poll released June 18, the proportion of Americans opposed to the US invasion of Iraq has doubled since April and now stands at 40%. Public opinion on Bush's handling of foreign policy was split down the middle, with 49% being favourable compared to 50% unfavourable.
A Detroit News poll, published on July 23, found that 48% of voters believe the White House misled the US people about the need to invade Iraq, while 47% didn't believe they were misled. Seventy-one per cent were concerned that the US occupation of Iraq would be "expensive, long and deadly".
"It could be worse than Vietnam, because the soldiers there don't know who to shoot at and they're being assassinated by people walking up behind them and popping them in the head", one voter told the Detroit News pollsters. "We shouldn't even be over there; there's no reason. All these claims of weapons of mass destruction — well, if Saddam had them, why didn't he use them to defend his own country?"
"There's no doubt [Bush] misled the country", Jackie Watkins, a 49-year-old mother of seven, told the Detroit News. Describing Bush's justifications for the war as "a scam", Watkins added: "It was unnecessary for us to go over there and I don't think it's helping any."
In an article, entitled "The war comes home", in Time magazine's July 28 edition, national political correspondent Karen Tumulty observed that "Americans' uncertainties about Iraq go far beyond the question of whether Bush used shaky intelligence in his State of the Union address last January. What bothers people is what they see happening day after day on the ground: their military men and women under siege, a casualty count that exceeds the toll of the first Gulf War, anti-Americanism in a land where they had been told our forces would be greeted like heroes, costs reaching a billion dollars a week and going up, some troops homesick and disillusioned, their spouses and parents having no idea when they will see their loved ones again and no end in sight to any of it."
'Another Vietnam'
Citing the results of a recent CNN-Time poll, Tumulty reported, "Nearly half of Americans, 45%, view the war as not being worth the toll it has taken in American lives".
"It's not the justification for the war" that bothers people, Democrat Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana told Tumulty. "It's the growing fear of quagmire after the war."
"It doesn't matter to me that we have not found weapons of mass destruction", Mary Holder, a 53-year-old owner of a pool hall in Dickerton, Texas, who voted for Bush three years ago, told the CNN-Time pollsters. "What matters to me is that our boys are still getting killed. I don't want this turning into another Vietnam where we dump truckloads of money and lives."
Tumulty reported that Bush's "standing has dropped with nearly every group, but his fall is particularly steep among the young people like Meg Brohn, 23, of Mount Clemens, Michigan, and her sister Caroline, 20. They supported the war, but they can't help noticing how many of those dying are around their age, and that has brought it home to them in a vivid and dismaying way."
"When our troops are being so viciously attacked, it's obvious the Iraqis don't want us over there", Caroline Brohn said.
According to the July 22 Washington Post, letters to US Congress members demanding a public inquiry into the Bush administration's pre-war claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction are "pouring in like a water main break — fast, and, yes, furious".
"About 400,000 people from every state have contacted members of Congress in the past three weeks as part of a MoveOn.org petition that asks Congress to investigate the controversial claims", reported the Washington Post. "It seems more and more people who supported the war are signing on", MoveOn.org campaign director Eli Pariser told Washington Post writer Evelyn Nieves. "They're angry. People who in the past couple of weeks before the war decided to support it are swinging back."
Anti-war movement revives
"For organizations that opposed the war", Nieves reported, "these are busy days. Not since hundreds of thousands of people across the country marched in anti-war rallies in the weeks before the US-led invasion has the rationale for the pre-emptive war come under such fire. The groups hope to galvanize a broad spectrum of the American people, a majority of whom supported the war, but with reservations.
"In the week since the administration admitted that President Bush's State of the Union speech in January should not have mentioned that the British had 'learned' Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Africa for a nuclear weapons program, anti-war groups say that more and more Americans have been contacting them, looking for answers."
"You know an issue has momentum when people are coming into your office to ask if there's a protest planned about it", Andrea Buffa, co-chairperson of the United for Peace and Justice coalition, told Nieves. The UFPJ was largely responsible for mobilising some 750,000 people onto the streets of New York City and San Francisco on February 15, part of the 12-million-strong February 14-16 weekend of world protests against Washington's impending invasion of Iraq.
At its June 6-8 national strategy conference in Chicago, however, the UFPJ decided to prioritise campaigns to defend civil liberties and opposition to the World Trade Organisation's mid-September mini-ministerial meeting in Cancun, Mexico, rather than building protest actions demanding the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.
The left-wing Act Now To Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) coalition — which organised the first US protest actions against the impending invasion of Iraq last October, and initiated the January 18 protest in Washington DC (which mobilised nearly 500,000 anti-war demonstrators), as well as building the February 15 protests — has continued to build demonstrations against the US occupation of Iraq. The most recent was a 5000-strong protest rally in Philadelphia on July 4.
A week after ANSWER initiated a call on July 11 for an October 25 march on the Pentagon to demand "Bring the troops home now", "End the occupation of Iraq" and "Money for jobs, education and healthcare — not war", it has been endorsed by some 1000 organisations and individuals across the US.
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, July 30, 2003.
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