American People: Fickle? Stupid? The Surge as Case Study

Sonny has an interesting, suggestive post about the surge and public opinion — “that’s why we don’t vote on military strategy,” he says: because “the public is fickle, not to mentioned underinformed and stupid.” And then he shows us this chart:

But look closely. There’s a hard core of surge ‘opponents’, around 15% of respondents, that won’t be cracking anytime soon, because these are also hard-core war opponents. This chart reflects what I’m reading as a fair number of war opponents who have gradually recognized that the surge is indeed ‘making the situation better’. This is not a huge demographic, except among intellectuals; it’s ably represented by the Yglesiases and Larisons and Sullivans of the world, who point out quite reasonably that the capacity of the surge to improve things was never really doubted by intelligent war opponents, whose point was that the surge was a smart tactical move within the context of a bankrupt, giddy, and intractable strategic nightmare…and only to that extent stupid.

And so it was easy for me to support the surge, because it seemed almost certain to ‘make the situation better’ but equally certain to not bring us any closer to resolving that situation. And that absurd calculus sits at the heart of the data captured in this chart. It turns out the the ‘fickle’ people (the kelly green line) are actually the least ‘stupid’, learning much more quickly than the stalwarts (the puke yellow line) who continue to deny that the surge has actually worked in military-tactical terms.

The question is less one of voting on military strategy as voting on military tactics, and surely Sonny is correct to imply that military tactics require a degree of military intelligence, expertise, and courage that is, and ought to be, beyond the ken or stomach of even upright democratic citizens. Strategy, on the other hand…is something we vote on. Or vote for and against, by the crude but effective recourse to throwing out members of the strategy-setting party and throwing in the other guys. Ergo Campaign ’06. It strikes me as wholly right and proper to apply voting pressure to political leaders who set the strategic agenda (the mission) for the military. Bush recognized this as such, but, naturally enough, since he was the guy under the public thumb he got very snippy and bitchy. Why did he dare to presume that the surge would work? “Because it has to.” Well. Sonny’s best case that people don’t know what the hell they’re talking about hinges on the fact that the phrasing of this frustrated question completely scrambled the distinction between successful tactics and strategy. But Bush’s war stubbornness has always derived in large part from just that kind of mental omelet.

The virtue of the surge was that it did buy Iraq time to sort itself out. But the tactical justification for the surge was that it would drive down Iraqi deaths and suppress street violence — as long as it was in place, at least. And the only real reason to oppose the surge from a sheer practicality/numbers standpoint was the concern that the surge would never end, driving up already significant costs in treasure and American blood until they became politically and economically impossible. In other words, the surge could never promise or guarantee that it would not become self-defeating. Average Americans, as I’ve claimed before, have a good horse sense about big-picture craziness: we can tolerate a lot of waste and many mistakes, and then one week we realize we are on The Wrong Track, and the American people shift their political weight accordingly. From Sonny’s angle, this might look irresponsible and moorless. I think it’s a bit more grounded in an inarticulable sort of wisdom, a sixth sense that perceives Badness Going Down. And so I can hardly fault the American people for being less stubborn about Iraq than the President. If the surge, as tactics, was off the board as far as voting was concerned, the whole question of the war that threw up the surge also threw up a countersentiment that was very much on the board…and the Democrats who were voted in as a result could hardly remain mute about the surge, or air the concerns of the voters they represented without any reference to it.

In other words, if the stubbornness of American leaders is often a good and necessary thing, the (politically) ‘unprinicpled’ practicality of the American people is, too — even if stubbornness sometimes shades into stupidity and practicality into fickleness. Without its partner in tension, either feature of democratic politics would run amok, and politics itself would become a zombie’s game of mindlessly, inarticulately following either the One or the Many.