The President's Global Credibility Gap

From the fall of Saigon until 2001, perhaps the only Vietnam War lesson most Americans could agree upon wasthat the United States should never again wage war without the strong and undivided support of its owncitizens. This may not have prevented a number of thinly approved wars in the 1980s and 1990s, but itcertainly inhibited policy-makers from pursuing other, more massive, military adventures. Now, however,President Bush is launching a war even though at least a third of his own people oppose it, and much of thesupport that does exist is either highly qualified, attributable to rally-around-the-troops patriotismprompted by the impending invasion, or based on White House misinformation that has gone largely unchallengedin the major American media.

Global opposition to a U.S. attack on Iraq is far more staggering. According to last month's GallupInternational poll of 41 nations, only three countries (the United States, the Netherlands, and New Zealand)offered majority support for a war even if the United Nations were to grant approval. Now, lacking UNsanction, Bush will wage war in defiance of overwhelming international dissent.
 
World criticism of U.S. policy takes many forms, but underlying it all is a fundamental distrust ofWashington's depiction of the Iraqi threat and of American motives for invading without broad internationalsupport. From Business Week magazine to European capitals to "the Arab street" (as commentatorsreductively label a diverse and complex region), many millions of people have openly challenged or rejectedout of hand official American claims. Long before the first missile could be fired to "shock andawe" Iraq, global public opinion had launched its own pre-emptive attack, wielding the weapon of massincredulity. On the eve of war, Bush has already produced an enormous global credibility gap, the largest anyU.S. president has faced since at least the "Christmas bombing" of North Vietnam in 1972.

"Credibility" has long been a preoccupation of American geopoliticians. Though never clearlydefined, its primary meaning for Washington has been the need to demonstrate our persistent will to defendAmerican policies throughout the world. From the first days of America's emergence as a superpower, ourleaders have normally acted as if U.S. credibility depended less on truthfulness than on an image of or theexercise of raw military strength. Beginning early in the Cold War, presidents, national security advisers,and nuclear strategists insisted that credible threats to use force were essential to protect vital U.S.interests whenever and wherever they were challenged. In Vietnam, American leaders prolonged the fighting notso much out of confidence that their objectives in that small, distant country could be achieved, but out of afear of losing and thus sapping our "global credibility."
 
The phrase "credibility gap" first entered American political vernacular in 1965, in the middle ofan era of "gaps" (from the "missile gap" to "the generation gap"). JournalistDavid Wise used it to highlight the gulf between President Lyndon Johnson's claim that American militaryescalation in Vietnam was limited and defensive and an emerging public perception that it was, in fact,massive and aggressive. In light of the current situation, it is important to recall that the Vietnam-eracredibility gap took years to form and did not become a Grand Canyon until the Nixon years, late in the war,after some 35,000 Americans and at least a million Vietnamese had already died.

The war against Iraq, by contrast, begins at a level of unpopularity not reached domestically in theVietnam War era until after the Tet Offensive of 1968. The President is gambling that a rapid victory willrally a dissenting and disbelieving world. No doubt he also expects the war to generate ex post facto evidence-- real or invented -- that Saddam Hussein was indeed plotting to use weapons of mass destruction in acts ofinternational terror. For many years, the experience of Vietnam conditioned American leaders to believe allfuture wars must be brief and conclusive to prevent the erosion of public support. In this instance, the WhiteHouse hopes a brief, conclusive war will provide the retroactive support it failed to gain at the outset.

Throughout the world, Saddam Hussein is rightly perceived as one of the most monstrous tyrants of our timeand there is a widespread international will to check whatever foreign ambitions he may have. Yet Washington'scredibility has foundered on its failure to persuade even many longtime allies of the following:

• That Iraq had significant links to Al-Qaeda.
  
  
• That Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to U.S. and global security.
  
  
• That UN inspections could never succeed in disarming Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.
  
  
• That every diplomatic effort to seek a peaceful resolution was exhausted.
  
  
• That the United States had no self-interest in Iraq (oil, military bases, regional hegemony), but onlysought democracy for Iraqis, stability in a crucial region, and an end to terrorism for the world.
  
  
• That democracy can be established in Iraq under the auspices of an American military occupation.

Most remarkable, perhaps, is that so many Americans have rejected those assertions despite a generallyuncritical media. Imagine how much deeper home-front disaffection would have been if the media had givenprominence to the many holes in the administration's case against Saddam Hussein. If so, would nearly half theAmerican public believe, as polls assure us they do, that Hussein was responsible for the attacks of 9/11, awholly unsubstantiated faith the White House has subtly encouraged? That the Iraqi dictator is horriblyoppressive can be easily documented, but the Bush administration has repeatedly proffered trumped up evidenceto make him an uncontainable evil-doer of Hitlerian proportions who must be overthrown.

Recent stories, often relegated to the inside pages of our newspapers, have posed fundamental challenges toBush's claim that Iraq is capable of deploying weapons of mass destruction beyond its own borders. Onenightmare scenario pushed by the White House had Hussein sending unmanned drones to drop chemical andbiological weapons on his neighbors, American troops in the area, or even the United States. In a page-12piece in the New York Times of March 13, John F. Burns describes one of these drones finally displayed at theIbn Firnas weapons plant outside Baghdad. According to Burns, it seemed

"more like something out of the Rube Goldberg museum of aeronautical design than anything that couldthreaten Iraq's foes. . . .Its two tiny engines, each about the size of a whiskey bottle, and attached tominuscule wooden propellers, looked about powerful enough to drive a Weed Whacker."

It had no mechanism for dropping a payload, had never successfully flown more than two miles from theairfield, and could only be controlled by visual tracking. Yet Secretary of State Colin Powell made Iraq'sunmanned aerial vehicles an important part of his crucial testimony against Hussein at the United NationsNational Security Council.

Amply contradicted, but underreported, was Washington's warning that Iraq is on the brink of possessingnuclear weapons. The administration made much of high-strength aluminum tubes Iraq had purchased. However, theInternational Atomic Energy Agency concluded that those tubes, while suitable for artillery shells, could nothave been used for enriching uranium for a nuclear weapon. And the claim that Iraq had purchased uranium fromNiger proved to be based on obviously forged documents. According to a recent story in the San Jose Mercury,angry UN inspectors, now fleeing Iraq, claim that "none of the nuclear-related intelligence trumpeted bythe administration has held up to scrutiny."

Bush betrays no concern about his failure to persuade. For him, the only "credibility" thatcounts is the kind that makes good on military threats. It matters not whether people believe your arguments;only that they believe your willingness to use deadly force to make your point. During the Vietnam War,Americans GIs were sometimes told to "make a believer" out of their enemy. It meant, of course, tokill them. Now the President begins a crusade to "make believers" out of unknown numbers of Iraqis.When Americans occupy Baghdad and the bodies are still being buried, he will tell us that the Iraqis are freeto chart their own destiny. Who will believe him then?

Copyright Chris Appy. Courtesy: Znet

Chris Appy is the author of Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides (to be published byViking in May)