LONDON, 25 March 2003 — The Bush administration likes to project confidence and it is now being assisted in that by generals with an abundance of what American soldiers call “command presence”.
Although some bad news is now coming in, this is a confidence which has so far been largely justified by military events. But the American government is also engaged in two much broader campaigns which go beyond, and will last much longer than, the military action.
They are to retain the support of the American people, and to win over the Iraqi people. Obviously interconnected, they could also turn out to be curiously parallel in nature. It is a support which is in each case going to be very demanding.
A whiff of how demanding it may be in Iraq came with reports from Safwan, where the population showed some of the predicted gratitude, but also suspicion of American and British motives, anger at civilian casualties, and an irrational insistence that the aid pledged in propaganda leaflets manifest itself immediately. Similar impatience can be sensed in some reports from the north, where many Kurds do not grasp that America cannot produce armored divisions like a conjuror or wonder how the most powerful state in the world could possibly have been wrongfooted by the Turks.
People who have been oppressed notoriously lose their idea of what is possible and often see in events a pattern in which they are the victims.
Civil affairs units, hundreds of thousands of ration packs, water purification equipment and the like have been readied by the Americans, but Iraqis may have such an inflated idea of US capacities that they will not understand the delay. They may be impatient thereafter with the pace of reconstruction, uninterested in what it may be costing America, and prone to imagine Iraqi resources are being stolen.
Such complaints could be the prelude to the much bigger problem of dealing with Iraqi demands for power in their own country, for it is obvious that, after a very short time, every day in which the US remains in charge will have to be justified to its people. “It’s going to be: Liberation? That was yesterday,” said one pessimist.
If Iraqis could turn out to be difficult beneficiaries of US power, the support of Americans themselves for this particular exercise of it may be less than solid. The anti-war movement appears strong, turning out 200,000 demonstrators in New York at the weekend. Having failed to stop the war, it is in the process of transforming itself into a very critical monitor of the occupation to come.
“I love Americans,” said Joe Cirincione, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “but they’re so easily molded.” He was referring to the rallying around the flag and the troops which war has brought, a surge of feeling manifest in a wave of genuine sympathy but also in commercial opportunism of the kind that offered Washington Post readers Sunday the chance to buy a four-inch-high figurine of a teddy bear in combat gear entitled Front Line of Freedom.
Yet American pride in its armed forces is, according to military sociologist Professor Charles Moskos of Northwestern University, “Patriotism-lite ... American society and military are quite distant, especially in the sense that the political elite and the upper classes no longer send sons and daughters into the services.”
Of 535 members of Congress only four have children in the military. The US military is an institution of advancement for part of the working class, particularly the minorities, and for a small portion of the lower middle class. They may be, as one columnist put it, “young people who are moving through Iraq with the most American of attitudes — open, confident, determined”.
But they are also the representatives in uniform of the social classes whose support for the war is conditional not only on it proving, in time, to have been a worthwhile risk, but also on it not coming at an unacceptable social price at home — 71 percent for Bush on the war in the polls contrasts with 67 percent thinking that the economy will get worse, a 10-year record.
Both issues come together in the resentment American reporters have recorded about the money some ordinary Americans feel is being spent, and will be spent, on the war and on the reconstruction of Iraq, money they feel is sorely needed at home. The Bush administration is now presiding over two peoples who may for the moment be giving them the benefit of the doubt, but who could prove to be very exacting indeed in the future.
