9
expressed the determination to punish enemies of the U.S. would enjoy” high levels of
support.
28
And Bush’s speeches at the National Cathedral and on two occasions before
joint sessions of Congress seemed to meet that challenge.
It is less clear whether he was equally successful on Iraq. For Afghanistan, Bush
“was forced by circumstance to lead the country into war,” but Iraq was “a war of his
own choosing,” undertaken in the face of determined international opposition and
domestic doubts.
29
During fall 2002 when the president and administration figures began
to establish the justification for action against Iraq, imprecision and exaggeration
underlay assertions about Iraq’s nuclear program, the capability of a fleet of unmanned
Iraqi aircraft, and Iraqi links with Al-Qaeda.
30
These factual inconsistencies threatened to
become a major “credibility gap”(a term previously used to describe the public’s distrust
of Lyndon Johnson during Vietnam) when, in July 2003, the media seized upon the
president’s State of the Union portrayal of Saddam Hussein as actively pursuing uranium
for a nuclear weapons program and asked whether the administration had intentionally
sought to mislead the American public. In addition, the stockpiles of chemical and
biological weapons predicted by the administration to be in Iraq were not found by
coalition forces.
31
It began to appear that, at best, the administration oversold the threat
posed by Iraq, excluding the qualifiers that intelligence agencies usually apply and
instead presenting a worst case analysis.
32
A PIPA poll issued on July 23, 2003, found
that 48 percent of the respondents felt that Bush had mishandled the evidence used to
justify going to war with Iraq. Sixty-one percent said that their confidence in the
president had been shaken at least a little by the way he had used the evidence (21
percent said their confidence was shaken “a little,” 19 percent said it was shaken “some,”
and 21 percent said it was shaken “a lot”).
33
If it is the case that wartime presidents can
choose to engage the public through “persuasion or manipulation,”
34
modern presidents
must take care that the former neither becomes nor is perceived to be the latter. Thus,
administration defenders had a difficult time reversing the negative perception by
blaming the liberal media for misrepresenting the president’s statements.
35
Beyond the issue of inaccuracy and exaggeration, however, even outspoken
supporters of using force in Iraq—such as former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, Joseph R. Biden (D, DE)—have argued that Bush failed to articulate fully
“what his policy is in general and, specifically, that securing Iraq will cost billions of
dollars, require tens of thousands of American troops for a considerable amount of time,
and that it's worth it...[and] in our national interest to stay the course.”
36
In other words,
Biden denies that Bush has met the FDR standard of clarifying purpose and articulating
costs. And at least some of the administration’s rhetoric established uncharacteristically
high expectations that could prove difficult to achieve: Iraq would become a thriving
democracy that would transform the Middle-East, and victory in Iraq would pave the way
for new progress on an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.
37
Some observers considered the president’s official rhetoric Lincolnian, citing for
example its frequent reference to Providence.
38
But Senator Robert C. Byrd (D., WVa.)
delivered some of the most biting criticism of the administration when he explicitly
contrasted Bush’s performance with Lincoln’s in his criticism of the president’s remarks
on May 1, 2003, designed to conclude the combat phase of the war:
As I watched the President's fighter jet swoop down onto the deck of the aircraft
carrier Abraham Lincoln, I could not help but contrast the reported simple dignity
Convention