Bush's Credibility Gap

A pair of complementary articles in today's Washington Post highlight Bush's "credibility gap". First we have this analysis of various over-optimistic (and outright absurd) claims made by the Bush administration concerning Iraq since the invasion:

Three years of upbeat White House assessments about Iraq that turned out to be premature, incomplete or plain wrong are complicating President Bush's efforts to restore public faith in the military operation and his presidency, according to pollsters and Republican lawmakers and strategists.

Vice President Cheney said Sunday that his 10-month-old claim that the insurgency was in its "last throes" was "basically accurate" and reflects reality. Since Cheney's original comment, on at least 70 days there have been violent attacks that in each instance killed more than 10 people. Two weeks ago, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the United States is making "very, very good progress" -- less than 48 hours before the U.S ambassador warned of a possible civil war breaking out. And Bush yesterday said his optimism flows in part from success in Tall Afar, a city in northern Iraq, though local residents there said sectarian violence is spreading.

The article is worth viewing merely for the graphic of various comments made by President Bush and members of the administration over the past three years that have so far proven to be utterly and completely wrong. The natural result of all this is that people are having a hard time trusting anything Bush has to say on Iraq now:

The cycle has taken a new spin with the latest evolution of Iraq from violent insurgency against foreign occupiers to sectarian strife bordering on civil war. Since the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra last month, hundreds of Iraqis have been killed in reprisals in a bloody spate of violence that has eclipsed most periods during the three years since the U.S.-led invasion.

All this has taken its toll on Bush's credibility, Republican strategists say, making it hard for him to make people see what he sees in Iraq. Continuing his latest drive to rebuild public support for the war, Bush flew to this Midwestern city on Monday to empathize with the pessimism many Americans feel as the war heads into its fourth year, while trying to explain the basis for his own optimism.

In his speech Bush tried to indicate that he understood the mood of frustration over Iraq, as rosy predictions have time and time again proven to be premature, inaccurate or unwarranted. Bush cited Tal Afar as an example of our "success" in Iraq:

Yet even the success stories seem to come with asterisks. The administration hailed the election of a new democratic parliament last year, but the new body has so far proved incapable of forming a government for more than three months. U.S. forces have trained more Iraqi security troops, but the only unit judged capable of acting fully independently of U.S. assistance no longer can...reports from the streets of Tall Afar, half a world away, offer a more complex story. U.S. forces last fall did drive out radicals who had brutalized the mid-size city near the Syrian border. But lately, residents say, the city has taken another dark turn. "The armed men are fewer," Nassir Sebti, 42, an air-conditioning mechanic, told a Washington Post interviewer Monday, "but the assassinations between Sunni and Shiites have increased."

The problem of course is that even Bush's new more understated statements on Iraq do not match the public mood. President Bush hardly approaches nuance in his public addresses, but the public-remembering the optimistic claims made over the past three years and the claims prior to the invasion that have proven to be absolutely wrong-are not so quick to accept any statement now that smacks of optimism that doesn't also have a healthy does of reality to it. And unfortunately, reality is not something that Bush seems eager to confront or appreciate.

The worst consequence of Bush's near total loss of credibility on Iraq is that even if tomorrow he and his administration adopted the plan that guaranteed the best chance of success in Iraq, it might be too late for it to have time to work. The average American's patience in Iraq is slowly running out (thanks in no small part to a lack of trust in the Bush administration) and as news report after news report indicates an ever-increasing amount of civil conflict, many will begin to doubt that there's anything that we (or the Bush administration) can do about Iraq. I believe there is still a chance at success in Iraq, and yet I question whether it's even possible for this adminstration to carry out even the best plan. It's really no surprise that those who are less optimistic believe we have no options but to leave as soon as possible and allow Iraq to descend into what they see will be an inevitible civil war.