President Homer

The Guardian runs an op-ed from Gary Younge today that is almost certain to infuriate Americans from both left and right. The thesis? That Americans are quitters when things get tough, that Americans are "defeat-phobic".

When the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, testified before a Senate armed services committee last week, the Republican senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, said: "I'm here to tell you sir, in the most patriotic state that I can imagine, people are beginning to question. And I don't think it's a blip on the radar screen. I think we have a chronic problem on our hands. We will lose this war if we leave too soon. And what is likely to make us do that? The public going south. And that is happening."

The critical factor driving this slump, explains Christopher Gelpi, associate professor of political science at Duke University who specialises in public attitudes to foreign policy, is not how many soldiers they lose but whether the mission for which they have fallen is likely to be successful. "The most important single fact is that the public perceive the mission as being destined for success. The American public is partly casualty-phobic but it is primarily defeat phobic. You can muster support for just about any military operation in the US so long as you can get enough of the defeat-phobic people on board."

Younge's argument relies on the confusion arising from a sudden tack in Bush administration rhetoric as the reason behind dropping approval numbers for the Iraq war as expressed in polls. As he says, "you can keep spinning just so long before you fall flat on your face. The administration's insistence that things are on track and all it must do is stay the course is beginning to grate." And that doesn't just mean grate with the public - it also means grate as various administration pontificators contradict each other or stray off what until the last two weeks has been "the message".

Certainly, Dick Cheney's comment that the insurgency was in it's "last throes" has rung a dissonance with comments by Rumsfeld and his generals since. You can reach for a dictionary for helpful definitions of "throes", but that dictionary will not help you spin the word "last" into meaning 2 years into a possibly 12 year fight. Nor will it help slant what Rumsfeld admitted, that "Foreign forces are not going to repress that insurgency,"..."We're going to create an environment (in which) the Iraqi people and the Iraqi security forces can win." That single off-message statement has left the Iraqi government putting a brave face on matters, saying that it was impossible to predict how long it would take to defeat the insurgents. "Politics is not mathematics," Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari told a London conference.

President Bush himself has been the leader of this about-face in his administrations objectives. Just the other day he announced that the military part of the plan was to train Iraqi security forces to fight the terrorists and then "our boys can come home" - before the final battles in Iraq are won. Even six month ago, he would never have made such a statement. The rhetoric of the administration, and of Bush in particular has always been about the Holy Grail of "Mission Accomplished" and that mission was stated loud and long - to not quit Iraq until every battle was won and the insurgency utterly defeated.

Enemies of freedom are making a desperate stand there, and there they must be defeated. This will take time, and require sacrifice. Yet we will do whatever is necessary, we will spend what is necessary, to achieve this essential victory in the war on terror, to promote freedom, and to make our own nation more secure. President Bush 2003.

Yet Bush is backtracking at a time when commanders on the ground are finally using sensible "hearts and minds" tactics whether their superiors like it or not, when US and Iraqi officials are negotiating with the purely nationalist portion of the insurgency giving hope of a ceasefire which would split the extremist religious terrorists from those purely fighting an alien occupier. These things may not fit the rhetoric of "America is bigger, biggest, best" and "death to all fanatics" but they are some of the most hopeful signs that the tipping point in Iraq could be positive rather than negative. The trouble is, Americans have been conditioned to only accept "America is bigger, biggest best" as a true sign of victory.

Perhaps, if the American people are "defeat-phobic" then it is because they cannot understand that Bush is actually giving them some real hopeful news now, after so long a period where rhetoric, not reality, has driven his administration's actions. It falls so far below what has been said previously that it sounds like defeat, even when it isn't. Not really. It was what should have been said all along.

Perhaps they feel instead that Bush, a real-life Homer Simpson, has taken a cult of ignorance, arrogance, incompetence and mistakes and made them a sellable TV commodity that they can comfortably emulate. After all, he is the President.

Perhaps, if Americans are "defeat-phobic" the blame should rest squarely on the shoulders of the man who gave them soundbites instead of truth, rhetoric instead of integrity and rose-colored dreams instead of effective plans.

The post above may not be the actual opinion of the author - he may just be s**t-stirring to get a debate going.