One of the strange shifts in its public posture on Iraq that’s been made by the Bush administration in recent weeks is the idea that total lack of progress on a national political settlement doesn’t matter, because progress towards a more orderly existence is being made on a local level here and there, a development that will somehow perculate up to Baghdad. The fact that Iraq’s sectarian fault lines are incredibly resistant to this kind of simple bottom-up solution, or that local “empowerment” may be completely inconsistent with national unity, doesn’t seem to enter into the equation. There’s a good, full analysis of the incoherence of what now passes for a Bush political strategy in Iraq by Dennis Ross up at the New Republic site.
Bush’s celebration of developments in Anbar Province is highly reminiscent of an earlier, grossly premature celebration over Iraq’s first “national” elections, back in January of 2005. All those GOP politicians waving purple fingers didn’t seem to be aware that the vast majority of Iraqi voters rejected every available inter-communal political option. And like Bush’s basic course of action in Iraq, that’s something that hasn’t changed at all.
TDS Strategy Memos
Latest Research from:
Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
-
May 2: Gaza and the 2024 Presidential Election
Having seen a lot of material of questionable utility on a key 2024 issue, I decided to explore it at New York:
The Israel-Hamas war has become an abiding presence in U.S. political discourse in the past six months. President Joe Biden has been lambasted by both a small but visible minority of Democrats who oppose his support for Israel as it wages war in Gaza, and Republicans who say he hasn’t done enough to back Israel and curb pro-Palestinian campus protests. But for all the noise and heat in the air on this subject, it’s still unclear whether the conflict in the Middle East will be a significant factor in the November presidential election.
Polling on Americans’ attitudes toward the conflict and its domestic fallout has been erratic and difficult to compare, as various pollsters have taken very different angles on the subject. But the “salience” of the issue as something that might push a significant number of voters this way or that is dubious at best.
There’s no question that U.S. public opinion has slowly evolved from strongly pro-Israel immediately after the October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas to a mixed assessment leaning toward hostility to Israel’s conduct of the war ever since. Already by November, Gallup found significant deterioration in Americans’ support for Israel’s war in Gaza, with 50 percent approving and 45 percent disapproving of Israeli military operations. By March of this year, the approval-disapproval ratio had dropped to 36 percent approval to 55 percent disapproval. Meanwhile, the reflexive sympathy Americans have traditionally felt for Israel when it’s embattled has eroded as well; as of February, Pew had found that a solid 57 percent of Americans sympathize “at least somewhat with both the Israeli people and the Palestinian people or equally with both of them.”
Nearly every survey on the subject has identified a significant generational divide on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, with those under the age of 30 sympathizing more with Palestinians and less with Israelis; opposing Israel’s military operations in Gaza by strong margins; and also opposing unconditional U.S. military aid to Israel. A Pew survey earlier this month showed that “six-in-ten adults under age 30 have a positive view of the Palestinian people, compared with 46% who see the Israeli people positively.” Meanwhile, “only 16% of adults under 30 favor the U.S. providing military aid to Israel to help in its war against Hamas, compared with 56% of those 65 and older.”
Young voters’ unhappiness with Israel and Biden’s policies on the Gaza conflict, compounded by less-well-documented but apparent pro-Palestinian tendencies among nonwhite voters, have created more and more of a partisan gap on Middle Eastern policy. The aforementioned March Gallup survey found that 64 percent of Republicans still approved of Israel’s military operations in Gaza, while 75 percent of Democrats disapproved. So long as Biden was identified as America’s most prominent supporter of Israel in the conflict, this disconnect with his own party’s base was potentially a source of intra-Democratic friction and a negative influence on Democratic enthusiasm for Biden’s reelection. The problem looked likely to go well beyond the relatively small number of “uncommitted” voters in Democratic presidential primaries this year who were explicitly seeking to condemn or reverse the president’s position on what was happening in Gaza.
Most recently, however, Republican politicians may have given Biden a hand — or at least reduced the possibility that pro-Palestinian voters would give them a second look out of anger at the president — with increasingly more vocal support for Israel, particularly after recent exchanges of fire between Israel and Iran. Republicans have been even more vocal about adopting what might be called an “anti-anti-Israel” stance: calling for repressive and punitive actions toward pro-Palestinian protesters. It’s also relevant that the most visible “third option” for voters unhappy with the two major parties, independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has been staunchly pro-Israel throughout the course of the Gaza war.
But is the Israel-Hamas war a voting issue — or a reason not to vote at all — for enough people to greatly affect the outcome of the November election? The available data on issue saliency doesn’t provide much evidence that it’s top of mind for that many voters.
A March 29 Gallup survey asked respondents to identify “the most important issue facing the country today.” “War in the Middle East” tied for 13th with just 2 percent. More often, pollsters don’t bother to break out the Israel-Palestine conflict as a singular concern, instead lumping it together with other foreign-policy concerns or national-security threats. But foreign policy in general isn’t looking terribly salient. A mid-April Economist-YouGov poll showed just one percent of Americans considered any or all foreign-policy issues as “the most important for you.” A late April University of North Florida national survey that added all of foreign policy to national-security challenges as an issue cluster found 6 percent of voters willing to identify it as most important in determining presidential preferences. But with Republicans fanning all sorts of national-security fears, who knows what that means?
Perhaps the most startling data comes from the very credible large-sample Harvard Youth Poll released on April 19:
“Poll results showed that two issues closely associated with under-30 voters — the Israel-Hamas war and student debt relief — may not be especially consequential ones when it comes to casting votes.
“Biden gets good marks (39 percent) for his efforts to reduce student debt, and poor marks for his handling of the war in Gaza (18 percent). But young people ranked these as least important among the issues facing the country. The majority said inflation, healthcare, and housing were the top three matters, followed by gun violence, according to the poll.”
To be more specific, under-30 voters listed “Israel/Palestine” 15th among the 16 “major issues” they were asked to rank in importance. Pew’s March survey on the subject noted low interest and information levels on the Middle East in the same age cohort:
“Just 14% of those under 50 say they are following the war extremely or very closely, roughly half the share among those over 50 (30%). Consistent with their lower levels of attention, younger Americans are also less likely to know key facts about the ongoing war, based on their responses to three knowledge questions included on the survey.”
Without question, perceptions of the presidential candidates and their political parties may be influenced on the margins by their positions and conduct on this and related issues. Biden’s efforts to broker a broader regional peace agreement could reinforce his reputation as an internationalist and a competent diplomat. Republican demagoguing about campus protesters could strengthen their issue advantage on crime. But even if news coverage continues to draw attention to the carnage in Gaza and its underlying causes, it may not be an election game-changer, unless the election is extremely close. If that’s the case, of course, almost anything could be decisive.
Democracy is hard. It takes practice. Expecting it to blossom at national parliamentary scale with no minor league farm system was unrealistic.
Before a large political aggregate can successfully decide questions by democratic mechanisms, it has to come to some understanding of what the decidable questions are. It has to reach a broad consensus about how sentiment is divided on those issues (axes of polarization and planes of cleavage) … what opposing coalitions are feasible … where the middle grounds are. Minorities need practice uniting behind the wills of majorities, and majorities need practice refraining from abusing minorities.
National scale is the wrong place to develop these understandings and practice these disciplines, and what emerged was division along convenient, familiar (sectarian) lines of division — which naturally became more polarized as a result.
Iraqi national democracy would have had a better chance if it had been preceded by a cycle or more of limited, local democracy. Town and provincial councils, etc, where the issues are public works and local regulations.
Even monocultural provinces can learn a lot about coalesence and compromise from running their own sewers.
So Bottom Up isn’t off by 180 degrees. 179? Maybe.
There has always been a “shadow” rationale for the U.S. presence in Iraq – a supposedly “hard-headed national security” argument that the region is strategically vital to the U.S. and profoundly unstable and therefore requires an ongoing and substantial U.S. military presence (one that, for religious and political reasons Saudi Arabia could not be asked to play).
From this perspective, all the other rationales for the invasion of Iraq and continuing U.S. presence over the years — Finding WMA’s, rescuing Iraqis from dictatorship, creating a beacon of democracy, preventing chaos, honoring the sacrifice of the troops — are all window dressing.
The real unspoken philosophy is that as a great military power we have the right to enforce stability in areas we consider strategic and we simply will not allow any indigenous insurgents to drive us out.
This is a fairly standard mental framework in the history of 20th century colonialism – it was the underlying attitude behind the French marching through the streets crying “Algeria is French” during the Algerian war of the 50’s and the stuffy British officers drinking to “The Empire” in the decades before World War II.
These days Americans need a more comforting rationale then dreams of imperial glory for occupying foreign countries — but the truth is that pretty much any rationale will do. The gut-level attitude is simply that once America commits to a military presence somewhere it should always “win” and never “give up”. In practice this means mantaining an occupying force on an essentially permanent basis.
Seen in this light, it is not really surprising that the various rationales being tossed around are almost completely incoherent, self-contradictory, and so on. People are not really supposed to believe them as logical arguments, any more then the French in the 50’s actually believed that Algeria was part of France.