By Brigitte L. Nacos
Most Americans are far more realistic than the Bush
administration in judging the impact of the Iraqwar on the threat of
terrorism. According to a new poll commissioned by The Third Way National Security Project,
55 percent of the public believe that the invasion of Iraq has made the United
States less safe and 54 percent think that the Iraq war “is a distraction that diverts resources and attention away from the real
war on terror.” I assume, the majority means that the real war on terrorism
would concentrate on hunting down Al Qaeda leaders and followers around the
world. Moreover, as Washington Post columnist David
Broder writes, “Large majorities -- including most Republicans -- reject
Vice President Cheney's contention that the absence of a second attack means we
are safer. Instead, they say that the threat of terrorism has increased since
2001, and they believe that the war in Iraq has made us less safe, not
more.” Indeed, four of five Americans disagree with the Vice President on this
count (89 percent Democrats, 87 percent Independents, 67 percent Republicans).
Three of four Americans (85 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of Republicans,
and 75 percent of Independents) believe that “in the last few years, the US has focused
too much on lofty ideals. We should focus instead on real threats to our own
security.” These attitudes of the majority of Americans are contrary to the
administration’s views. Like the President, most Americans believe that
terrorism is a very serious threat (in fact, 86 percent consider “terrorism as serious
a threat to America and the world today as Nazism and Communism were in the 20th
century), but a majority no longer supports major assumptions and goals of
his administration’s counterterrorist policies. Thus, two thirds of Americans
want a foreign policy that protects American security regardless of “whether it
spreads or ideals or not.” Nearly three
of five Americans want the U.S.to consider negotiations with Iran and Syria, if that would be
helpful to America’s
security interests.
In the months and years following the terrorist attacks of
9/11, the news was dominated by administration sources and the positions they
took in the “war on terrorism.” Alternative sources and views were
under-covered or not covered at all. While it is true that most Washingtonians
went along, there were those sources that contradicted the administration’s
positions.
In their excellent book The
Rational Public, Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro concluded that
“information available to the public may sometimes be overwhelmingly false,
misleading, or biased. When it is, and especially when virtually no dissenting
elite voices are heard—in some foreign policy situations, for example, where
the executive branch controls information and events or where “bipartisan”
foreign policy holds sway—the public may be led astray. The rational public can
be deceived.” That’s pretty much what
happened after 9/11, during the build-up to the Iraq war and during and after the
invasion phase. The not fully informed public rallied around the President and
his policies.
As the news media and more members of the political elite overcame their 9/11syndrome, the public received information from a variety of sources with distinctly different views. Page and Shapiro consider the American public “as substantially capable of rational calculations about the merits of alternative public policies, based on the information that is made available to it…the public is surprisingly resistant to be fooled—so long as competing elites provide at least some alternative voices.”
Yes, when alternative voices were heard in the news, this changed America’s mass-mediated debate and in the process public attitudes about the war on terrorism.
Comments