Why Bushs' Iraq Plan Is Doomed

I am sure that President Bush is feeling somewhat dazed these days. He came into office a mere 71 months ago full of determination and with his agenda still wet from the printers office tucked under is arm. What happened in such a short time?

Actually what happened to President Bush will continue to happen to politicians in our country until we deal with some of the following issues.

1. few common values among the divergent groups that make up our society.
2. a failure of immigrants to meld with in the American culture.
3. a loss of the American ideal and dream.
4. A loss of religion and its values within American society.
5. A loss of trust in each other and especially politicians.

Another factor that affects The President and all politicians is the ready availability of news, comment, and debate within society. This factor has not only left the politicians scratching their heads, but church leaders, busuiness leaders, and all formal institutions of American culture doing likewise. Even the American Red Cross is under serious scrutiny because of published accounts of how they respond to relief efforts in our country. And of couse this leads to fewer donations.

The two party political system and its ability to represent so many different communities and their priorities results in ineffectual leadership and continued stalemate on major issues facing America.

An example of the Presidents Iraq policy and its rapid disapproval ratings bear witness to the affects of our fractured society.

Right now approximately 35% of Americans agree that America should stay engaged in Iraq, yet four years ago, most Americans believed we needed to address our countries vulnerablility in the wake of the World Trade Center attack..

Politicians cannot afford to have such low poll numbers and therefore America will pull out of Iraq. The real reason that the numbers are low is rooted in one or more of the 5 items I listed above.

We are a country so divided after years of cultural breakdown, that no politician is able to mount a sustained agenda and at the same time can keep the public support high enough to be within their comfort zone, ie:--re-election zone.

If we were a united people, healthcare, social security, public education, energy, and transportation issues would already be solved with new vibrant united zeal. Instead there are so many self centered views about these issues, from so many communities with myopic vision, that no solution is available until we address the fractures within our people.

Compunding the Presidents agenda and all the political agendas is that politicians have lost their ability to control media and its content. Americans over 40 who use the internet for example, visit 6 sites on average. Younger Americans visit 29 sites on average. Now those sites can be news, entertainment, hobby related, blogs, forums, chat rooms,--all manner of sites. My point with these statictics is that no political party or politician can influence this many independant information sources. There are millions of individual sources to choose from. Here I am making comment on this subject and a few folks will read this and whether they agree or not--they will have been exposed to another view. So I can be considered a source [minor]--but none the less another published source. The ability to control propaganda has been lost.

What was once a television market controled by three major networks now has over 100 different channels each with their own content and view.

What was once radio with a few commentators such as Larry King is now a media with dozens of talking heads and their respective agendas.

The ability to manipulate and direct public attention and support in a broad scale through all media has been lost.

But our problems as a society still exist and still cry out for solutions.

President Bush and American politics have simply lost its ability to commander an agenda which is supported by the majority of Americans. We all feel disconnected from each other, our communities, and our country.

We have no common roots anymore. We have dozens if not humdreds of individual cultural communities with their own agendas.

If America had been this rootless and fractured in 1861, President Lincoln would have lost the civil war and we would have two distinct countries where one once was.

We were a country founded upon such deep roots and beliefs in our own sacred sociiety, that for most of our history we remained a people unto itself and content at isolation. Isolationism was the reason America was so late entering both world wars in the 20th century. A loss of those same deep roots can be viewed as a cause of us now being intent upon projecting our might and influence outside our borders.

Most of the fractured communities within our country feel that America needs to return to our roots and cultural heritage. To insist that new immigrants integrate into American culture and leave their old behind. Outside of an outright invasion by foreign powers onto our shores, Americans are ready to pull their collective horns in and revert their attention away from terrorist problems a half world away and 1,400 years old.

There is only one true unifying force that is capable of transcending all peoples.

Religion and faith is that force. and only a political system that embodes these same ideals can succeed in solving mankinds varied problems. We are all different and we are a fractured society--but when all these differences are set aside and we peel away the layers--we are united at our core by a common creator and a common basic conscience.

It is religion and faith that have been under the most vicious assault over the past four decades in America.

It is religious warfare that is behind the worlds problems.

President Bush has three more years in office. If he wants to have a succesful last term in office, he needs to re-direct the focus on his adminisration to uniting all the various communities under one mantra that can bring us back together as a nation.

"GOD"

I don't mean under a state religion or my "GOD"--I mean under programs that get back to the common nature we all share. America will only win wars such as the terrorist war when we win back our common roots. If we want to be a nation that projects its values--then those values that need projected are plainly layed out in the Christian bible. Lessons are shown throughout the Old Testament that can be applied to our own country. I'm sure that terrorist agents existed back in Noahs' time. People who twisted religion to become a brand of behavior completely foreign to our creators intent.

If the President wants to address the 5 points and move our country towards solving every groups concerns, then he must unite all the groups together. If he doesn't make strides to this end, then he will be left with a bald spot on his head from all the frustrated scratching and we will be left three more years away from solving not only terrorism--but all the other issues that are screaming for attention.

Come on Yodi, we need to pray for a change in fuzzy thinking going on in our nations leadership. The answer to their bald spots is right in front of their nose--right in front of their face in the mirror. It is believing that mankind alone can solve mankinds problems through political and military solutions.
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Note:
Evidence of the affects the 5 pints I listed on politics can be found in the attached article. when reading it notice how many different polls and views the author used to support her article.
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USA > Foreign Policy
from the November 21, 2005 edition

Why Iraq war support fell so fast

US public support has dropped faster than during the Vietnam and Korean wars, polls show.

By Linda Feldmann | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON – The three most significant US wars since 1945 - Korea, Vietnam, and now Iraq - share an important trait: As casualties mounted, American public support declined.
In the two Asian wars, that decline proved irreversible. With Iraq, the additional bad news for President Bush is that support for the war in Iraq has eroded more quickly than it did in those two conflicts.





For Mr. Bush, low support for his handling of the war - now at 35 percent, according to the latest Gallup poll - has depleted any reserves of "political capital" he had from his reelection and threatens his entire agenda. Last week's bombshell political developments, both the bipartisan Senate resolution calling for more progress reports on Iraq and the stunning call for withdrawal by a Democratic hawk, Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, have not helped.

But the seeds of Bush's woes were planted early on. Just seven months into the Iraq war, Gallup found that the percentage of Americans who viewed the sending of troops as a mistake had jumped substantially - from 25 percent in March 2003 to 40 percent in October 2003.

In June 2004, for the first time, more than half the public (54 percent) thought the US had made a mistake, a figure that holds today.

With Vietnam, that 50-percent threshold was not crossed until August 1968, several years in; with Korea, it was March 1952, about a year and a half into US involvement.

Why did Americans go sour on the Iraq war so quickly, and what can Bush do about it?

John Mueller, an expert on war and public opinion at Ohio State University, links today's lower tolerance of casualties to a weaker public commitment to the cause than was felt during the two previous, cold war-era conflicts. The discounting of the main justifications for the Iraq war - alleged weapons of mass destruction and support for international terrorism - has left many Americans skeptical of the entire enterprise.

In fact, "I'm impressed by how high support still is," Professor Mueller says. He notes that some Americans' continuing connection of the Iraq war to the war on terror is fueling that support.

In addition, intense political polarization gives Bush resilient support among Republicans.

But among Democratic voters who supported the US-led invasion initially, most have long abandoned the president. In polls, independent voters now track mostly with Democrats. And, analysts say, once someone loses confidence in the conduct of a war, it is exceedingly difficult to woo them back.

"[Bush's] best option is bringing peace and security to Iraq," says Darrell West, a political scientist at Brown University. "If he can accomplish that, people will think the war's going well and that he made the right decision. But that's proving almost impossible to achieve."

Pollster Daniel Yankelovich, writing in the September/October 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, states that "in my judgment the Bush administration has about a year before the public's impatience will force it to change course."

Not helping the president has been the modern phenomenon of 24/7 cable news coverage, which brings instant magnification to the daily death toll and the longstanding media practice of focusing on negative developments.

And there is the lingering public memory of Vietnam itself, which, in the Iraq war, may have made the public warier sooner of getting stuck in a quagmire.

Scholars like Mueller at Ohio State speak of an emerging "Iraq syndrome" that will have consequences for US foreign policy long after American forces pull out - particularly in Washington's ability to deal forcefully with other countries it views as threatening, such as North Korea and Iran.

"Iraq syndrome" seems to be playing out, too, with the American public. The just-released quadrennial survey of American attitudes toward foreign policy - produced jointly by the Pew Research Center and the Council on Foreign Relations - shows a revival of isolationism. Now, 42 percent of Americans say the US should "mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own" - up from 30 percent in 2002.

According to Pew Research Center director Andrew Kohut, that 42 percent figure is also similar to how the US public felt in the mid-1970s, at the end of the Vietnam War, and in the 1990s, at the end of the cold war.


SOURCE: THE GALLUP ORGANIZATION; RICH CLABAUGH - STAFF