18
Republicans in Congress on this issue. It also provided time for the Bush administration
to work towards building both domestic and international support for military action. As
criticism among American elites mounted (beginning in early September), favorability
ratings of President Bush declined somewhat, though never below 50 percent. However,
this decline was reversed beginning in October as the administration took greater control
of the media agenda (Brody, 1994).
On December 17 2000 the U.N. passed a U.S. led resolution setting January 15 as
the deadline for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, and on January 12, after talks between the
U.S. and Iraq ended in a stalemate, Congress passed a resolution giving the President
authorization to use military force against Iraq. As the U.N. deadline approached, a
Times-Mirror survey found that Americans supported the use of immediate force against
Iraq if it failed to withdraw its troops from Kuwait by 51 percent to 42 percent. Once
fighting began (on January 17 2001), Americans rallied around the decision, with surveys
showing between 65 and 80 percent of the public supporting the use of force and the
President’s handling of the conflict throughout its duration.
The building and maintenance of majority support for the use of force was
facilitated by a number of factors beyond the objective circumstances themselves. Prior
to the start of the war, criticism of the use of force in the media was largely dependent on
the extent to which American (not foreign) elites were willing to provide such criticism.
And with the exception of the period in September of 2000, such criticism was largely
muted (Brody, 1994). And the use of public diplomacy by Kuwait and public relations by
the administration helped build public support for U.S. action (Mannheim, 1994;
MacArthur, 1992)
Convention