We're Still in the Desert
April 28, 2006
On Monday afternoon, CNN released the results of its latest opinion poll regarding President Bush’s job performance. Not surprisingly, the President’s approval rating continues to slide—only 32 percent of the poll’s respondents approved of how Bush is handling his job, while 60 percent disapproved. Results were similarly negative for other measures of the President’s performance. Forty-seven percent of respondents believed that “competent” was an accurate characterization of President Bush, 46 percent described him as “a strong and decisive leader,” and just 40 percent described him as “honest and trustworthy.” The results of the poll indicate that half of both registered voters and all Americans would vote for a Democrat if the midterm elections were held today.
As dire as the results may be for the President and the Republican Party, the poll was even more intriguing because of the questions that it did not ask. In addition to the general questions about the President’s job performance and voting intentions, respondents were also asked questions about gas prices. Despite the central role that it has played in the steady decline of Bush’s approval ratings, they were not asked about the war in Iraq.
When American military casualties rose sharply in late 2004 and early 2005, media coverage of and public outrage against the war reached a fevered pitch. Daily headlines in the country’s major newspapers centered around the deaths of soldiers and Marines, and support for the war, which had previously been fairly even with opposition, largely dissipated. When asked to think about the goals versus the costs of the Iraq war, nearly three-quarters of respondents to Washington Post-ABC polls saw U.S. military casualties as unacceptable following that period. Only 41 percent of those polled believed that the Iraq war was worth fighting.
The unfortunate result of the intense media coverage and public outcry was that the idiocy of the war largely became a settled issue. Despite the asinine allegations coming from supporters of the war of biased Iraq media coverage, reporting of daily happenings, including casualties, in Iraq have fallen to pitiful levels. Whether the public has been desensitized to combat coverage or the media has abandoned it for the new angle, reporting on Iraq in major outlets has been reduced almost entirely to process stories about the Bush Administration’s mishandling of the war and Iraqi government politics. Over a four-day period early this week, a span that witnessed the combat deaths of nine American soldiers, the New York Times limited its reporting of the war to stories about the Iraqi Parliament and Prime Minister, and issues peripheral to Iraq, such as former military officers’ calls for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Pictures of American military personnel made the cover only once, in a photograph of President Bush eating lunch with Marines in California. The newspaper’s reporting of the casualties was buried within a story about Iraqi politics in the middle of the International News section.
Make no mistake, despite the reduced coverage of combat in Iraq, the United States’ full-scale occupation of a Middle Eastern country is the country’s most momentous issue now and for the foreseeable future. Other stories, such as the Duke lacrosse scandal and Secretary Rumsfeld’s embattled position, while important, pale in comparison to the significance of American troops continuing to serve in a constantly hostile and often fatal environment.
These facts continue to be true of the Iraq war: American military fatalities continue to occur at a rate in line the war’s averages—more than two and a half per day in April, an estimated 36 Iraqi civilians are killed in a typical day—that means they experience a loss of life equivalent to 9/11 every two and half months, and there is still no end in sight.
The real danger of the media lack of reporting on and the country’s apparent desensitization to the horrors of the Iraq war is that it will continue long after it is obvious that it is an unsalvageable situation. In Vietnam, a situation that was much more similar to Iraq than anyone seems comfortable admitting, American casualties doubled near the end of the war after it was widely agreed that victory could not be achieved. The result was that the last 25,000 casualties of that war are nearly impossible to justify. It would be unacceptable for the country’s collective short attention span to recreate this tragedy.