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So far, Americans are giving Bush a pass about the lies used to justify the Iraq war. But will fear, ignorance, and faith in the president's integrity keep him Teflon-coated forever?
Jun 19, 2003 | At some point we will know just how wrong President Bush and his advisors were about the threat that Iraq posed to America; we will learn whether our leaders were lying or mistaken, well-intentioned or duplicitous. Whatever their motives, though, it increasingly looks like Bush spurred America to war with falsehoods, that much of the information the administration offered the public as a justification for a war that has so far killed more than 100 Americans, 30 Britons and several thousand Iraqis was not true.
Americans, though, don't seem to care.
Polls taken recently indicate that most Americans are either unconcerned at the apparent collapse of the rationale behind a war that's still killing their compatriots, or ignorant of the whole situation. Before the Iraq war, a Knight Ridder poll showed that nearly half of Americans surveyed believed, erroneously, that there were Iraqis among the Sept. 11 hijackers. During the war, a Los Angeles Times poll showed that 59 percent of respondents were convinced, despite all available evidence, that Saddam was either partly or mostly responsible for Sept. 11. Now that America's failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is becoming an increasingly contentious political issue, a third of respondents in a University of Maryland poll believed that the weapons already have been uncovered. A fifth of those polled think Iraq actually used such weapons in the war.
"Polls right now indicate that people are not believing that there was any fabrication or misleading" on the part of the administration, says John Zogby, president of the polling firm Zogby International. "Generally speaking, even in an era of greater distrust, most people still rely on their principal sources of information -- either news media or what leaders say via the news media. They get filtered information."
And, say some experts, because of the public's willingness to believe this "filtered information," the Bush team might remain unscathed even if it turns out they actively exaggerated Iraq's threat to the U.S. There are a number of reasons -- some historical, some intrinsic to all societies during wartime -- that Americans appear to believe things about the war that are demonstrably false, and there is a chance they'll never accept the idea that their president lied to them. The question, then, is whether American democracy can survive a citizenry that either doesn't know or doesn't care if its leaders tell the truth. At the very least, observe some experts, public ignorance, apathy or denial could change the kind of democracy under which Americans live.
In some respects, the issues of ignorance and denial have been perennial sources of anxiety in America. After each election, whenever fewer voters manage to drag themselves to the polls, there's a spate of "Whither democracy?" think pieces and intellectual handwringing about the country's declining civic culture. Books bemoaning Americans' benightedness are a staple of both the left and the right, from Noam Chomsky's voluminous writings on American domestic propaganda to Allan Bloom's "The Closing of the American Mind."
"The country goes through periods of engagement in popular and political culture and periods of disengagement," says Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU who studies the media's role in democracy. "If you look at any one political moment, there are issues on which there is a great deal of public engagement and issues on which there isn't. It has a lot to do with how difficult the issue is [to understand]."
Others point out that past scandals gestated for months before the public started paying attention. "I've gone through several major government scandals both inside and out of government," says Michael Greenberger, a University of Maryland law professor who worked on counterterrorism issues in the Clinton administration. "I think there is always a slowness on the uptake. It takes a while to sort of pierce the American psyche. The Vietnam War took a very, very long time to pierce the public's concern. Watergate took months and months." As Zogby says, "It took the jaws of life to get Nixon out of the White House, and that's when most Americans thought he was guilty." Essentially, there is nothing new about politicians lying or about Americans not paying close attention to them.
This is of little comfort, though, to administration critics baffled by Americans' nonchalance toward the Bush administration's apparent dishonesty about Iraq. The Nation's David Corn spoke for many liberals when he wrote, "It is hard to resist reprising the GOP call of yesteryear, Where is the outrage? Just imagine how much shock and complaining there would be if we learned that 'American Idol' had been rigged. But Bush and his comrades can use deceptive means to launch a war and to pass trillion-dollar tax cuts that bust the bank -- and then skate away."
Right now, polls show that a majority of Americans don't believe that the Bush administration used deceptive means to launch a war. Part of the group that continues to trust Bush is made up of those who fundamentally disagree with Corn's analysis or are willing to wait longer for proof. "To anyone who's fair-minded about this, it's too soon to draw any conclusion that the weapons aren't going to be found, and whether they're found or not, it's extremely far-fetched to conclude that he didn't have them," says Joshua Muravchik, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "Maybe he destroyed them. Maybe he's hidden them."
