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Fighting the wrong
war
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON
- Thursday's terror attacks against
London's public transportation system, which killed at least
37 people, came amid indications of growing
skepticism here about the effectiveness of US President
George W Bush's "war on terror", the
policy initiative that earned him his
highest public-approval ratings.
The Gallup organization released a new survey
this week which found that 41% of US respondents
believed that neither the US and its allies nor
the "terrorists" were currently winning the war
and that a two-and-a-half year high of 20% of the
public believed that the "terrorists are winning".
Thirty-six percent of respondents, nearly
two-thirds of whom described themselves as
Republicans, said the US was winning the war, down
sharply from 66% after the US-supported ouster of
the Taliban in Afghanistan in January 2002, and
65% after US troops captured Baghdad in April
2003.
"Not only did the poll reveal
increasing public frustration with the war in Iraq
and flagging presidential approval ratings," said
Darren Carlson, Gallup's government and politics
editor, "but it also showed the public is not too
confident that the United States and its allies
are winning the war against terrorism."
Whether Thursday's attacks will add to
that skepticism and further erode public support
for Bush's leadership remains to be seen,
although, as noted by Carlson, the growing
pessimism about the Iraq war makes him more
vulnerable than at any other time since the US-led
invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Previous
major bomb attacks give little clue. According to
a Newsweek poll taken a week after the Madrid
train bombings on March 11 last year, a small
majority of respondents said the attacks did not
shake their confidence in Bush's strategy.
But in October 2002, just days after the
bombing of a Bali nightclub that killed more than
200 people, mostly Australian tourists, public
confidence in Bush's approach fell to an all-time
low: just 32% of respondents said they thought
Washington was winning the war at the time.
Adding to Bush's vulnerability at the
moment, however, is the fact that most Democrats,
who generally stood by the president on
foreign-policy matters between the September 11
attacks and the onset of last year's presidential
election campaign in the spring of 2004, have been
arguing for more than a year now that Bush's
invasion of Iraq had diverted key resources and
attention from the war against al-Qaeda and other
hardline Islamist groups, effectively undermining
that effort.
Analysts here clearly believe
that al-Qaeda or an offshoot was indeed
responsible for the London attacks. "It has all
the earmarks of al-Qaeda," noted Dennis Ross,
director of the Washington Institute on Near East
Policy and a top US Middle East negotiator under
former presidents George H W Bush and Bill
Clinton.
He and other analysts noted the
well-planned nature of the attacks, their
simultaneity, and the timing to coincide with the
first day of the Group of Eight summit at
Gleneagles, Scotland - the world's central news
event of the week - as hallmarks of an al
Qaeda-like operation.
The BBC reported
that a previously unknown group calling itself
"The Secret Organization of al-Qaeda in Europe"
had claimed responsibility for the explosions. The
group reportedly warned the "Danish and Italian
government and all other crusaders" to withdraw
troops from Afghanistan and Iraq and that the
attacks were carried out in "revenge from the
British Zionist crusader government in retaliation
for the massacres Britain is committing in Iraq
and Afghanistan".
Some analysts pointed to
a letter purportedly by Osama bin Laden himself
that first surfaced June 20 in which he stated
that he was "preparing for the next round of
jihad". "We want to give the good news to the
Muslim ummah that, with the blessing of Almighty
Allah, we have been successful in reorganizing
ourselves and are going to launch a jihadi program
that is absolutely in accordance with the changed
situation."
In the same communique, he
warned the leaders of Muslim countries cooperating
with enemy efforts that they would be targeted.
Over the past week, high-ranking diplomats from
the Baghdad embassies of Egypt, Bahrain and
Pakistan - all countries that have been publicly
urged by Washington to fully normalize relations
with Iraq - were attacked by insurgents.
On Thursday, the al-Qaeda in Iraq
group, reportedly led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
announced that it had executed the charge d'affaires at
the Egyptian mission who had been with the first
Arab ambassador to post-Saddam Baghdad, Imad al-Sharif,
who was abducted from near his home earlier this
week.
Michael Chertoff, the secretary for Homeland Security,
indicated he also believed that an al-Qaeda-like
group was involved in London, but stressed
that Washington had no "specific credible
information of an imminent attack here". His
department raised the terrorism warning alert to
"orange" and ordered extra precautions on public
transportation systems, especially the rail
system.
He added that the London's
bombings were "not an occasion for undue anxiety"
in the United States.
Bush, who arrived at
Gleneagles in Scotland on Wednesday, expressed his
solidarity with the British and repeated an
oft-used line that "the ideology of hope" will win
over "the ideology of hate". He also said the
bombings showed that "the war on terror goes on".
While the latter observation was
unquestionably accurate, it raised the larger
question of how that war is defined and carried
out.
With polls over the past two months
showing a sharp plunge in public approval for the
way Bush has carried out the war in Iraq, the
president last week tried to rally the nation once
again in a prime-time speech that was clearly
designed to frame US efforts in Iraq - an issue on
which the public has shown greater skepticism - as
central to the "war on terror", the issue on which
his approval ratings have been highest.
Just before the speech, a New York
Times/CNN poll, for example, found that public
approval for his handling of Iraq was just 37%,
while approval for his "campaign against
terrorism" stood at 52%, 15 percentage points
higher.
Bush's renewed efforts to
associate the Iraq war with the "war on terror",
which drew loud complaints from Democrats and the
media, may not be as effective as in the past.
However, a succession of polls in recent months
has shown that the public has come increasingly to
see the two wars as separate.
Indeed,
for the first time since the US invasion of Iraq,
a majority of the public, by a 50-47% margin, sees
Iraq as distinct from the "war on terror",
according to a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll released
last week. The same poll found that a similar
plurality believes the war in Iraq has made the US
less safe from terrorism, and a 53% majority now
believes that the Iraq invasion was itself a
mistake.
The fact that al-Qaeda or one of
its affiliates has now struck in the heart of
another Western capital - and Washington's closest
ally - could add to the growing sense that the
Iraq war was and remains a diversion from the
fight against al-Qaeda, despite the reportedly
growing participation of radical Islamists in that
conflict.
At the same time, according to
Steven Kull, director of the University of
Maryland's Program of International Policy
Attitudes, the attacks could favor Bush, at least
in the short term. "Whenever there are bombings
close to home, it generates fear, and fear
intensifies concern about terrorism and makes
people marginally more receptive to the kind of
frames that Bush has used," he said.
(Inter Press
Service) |
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