Why did Americans go sour on the Iraq war so quickly, and what can Bush do about it?

John Mueller, an expert on war and public opinion at Ohio State University, links today's lower tolerance of casualties to a weaker public commitment to the cause than was felt during the two previous, cold war-era conflicts. The discounting of the main justifications for the Iraq war - alleged weapons of mass destruction and support for international terrorism - has left many Americans skeptical of the entire enterprise.

In fact, "I'm impressed by how high support still is," Professor Mueller says. He notes that some Americans' continuing connection of the Iraq war to the war on terror is fueling that support.

In addition, intense political polarization gives Bush resilient support among Republicans.

But among Democratic voters who supported the US-led invasion initially, most have long abandoned the president. In polls, independent voters now track mostly with Democrats. And, analysts say, once someone loses confidence in the conduct of a war, it is exceedingly difficult to woo them back.

"[Bush's] best option is bringing peace and security to Iraq," says Darrell West, a political scientist at Brown University. "If he can accomplish that, people will think the war's going well and that he made the right decision. But that's proving almost impossible to achieve."

Pollster Daniel Yankelovich, writing in the September/October 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, states that "in my judgment the Bush administration has about a year before the public's impatience will force it to change course."

Not helping the president has been the modern phenomenon of 24/7 cable news coverage, which brings instant magnification to the daily death toll and the longstanding media practice of focusing on negative developments.

And there is the lingering public memory of Vietnam itself, which, in the Iraq war, may have made the public warier sooner of getting stuck in a quagmire.

Note that we see here the first glimmerings of what is bound to become the Republican excuse for failing in Iraq, that it was the media's coverage which doomed the whole thing. That's the excuse that worked so well for Vietnam (where it wasn't the 24/7 cable news cycle that was the villain, but the new technology will allowed combat bloodshed to be the main ingredient of American dinnertime while watching the nightly news) and it will be trotted out again for this debacle as well, despite the fact that the military, with the concept of embedding, did a fantastic job of co-opting the media, just as they intended should happen (a direct result of their experiences in Vietnam and the Gulf War).

The military will probably "learn" the lesson that the media needs to be even more tightly controlled, but that's really not the right moral to take away from the tale of Iraq. The correct lesson is really for the politicians and policy makers, and it's that we should only get involved in wars that (a) we can wrap up quickly, or (b) are morally justified. It's not that the American public is any less able to stand deaths and casualties in war than they were two or three or four generations ago, it's just that they won't abide them for very long when the cause is indistinct, undefined and unjustified.

Pace Yankelovich, I very much doubt that Bush has as much as a year before the hammer falls, not with his approval rating continuing to go south, his administration under multiple investigations, and the Republican party beginning to lose its coherence. Besides that, there really is no viable solution for the problem that Bush has created in Iraq, because Iraq was never a viable country in the first place. Attempting to keep it together as a single nation is a doomed enterprise, and the insurgency won't stop just because we remove ourselves from the scene -- it will continue and break out into full-scale civil war, in which the Iranians will back the Shiites against the Sunnis, and the Kurds will withdraw into their borders to continue as a de facto independent country.

Ironically, it's the oil that makes the situation impossible. If it weren't for all three major claimants (Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds) wanting a share of Iraq's oil money, we could probably have gone ahead and divided the country back into the constituent parts it was before the Brits assembled it as part of the Sykes-Picot Agreement after World War I. (The Turks would have been pissed off, but we could have guaranteed the borders of the new Kurdish country and bribed both parties to behave long enough for the situation to settle down a little.) Dividing up still seems to me to be a likely long-term outcome -- although with one of the parties controlling the oil, which will (of course) eventually lead to destabilization.

Of course, another long-term possbility is that a new Saddam Hussein will take charge and set up a dictatorship, perhaps even under cover of the new constitution. Who will there be to prevent it?

Bush really has opened up a fearfully complex and perhaps totally unmanageable can of worms. I keep looking for some sign of a way in which the unbalanced state of the conflicting interests can be reorganized, in hopes that a solution might present itself out of that realignment, but I can't see it.

[Thanks to Jeremy for the link]