Check out this analysis by Gallup (hat tip to kos). Now, take a look at when support for the Iraq War flipped–between November of 2004 and March of 2005, shortly after the Iraq War ceased to be resolved by the massive assault on Fallujah and the Iraqi election.
So lets return for a minute to a question Democrats asked during the election: why did Bush chicken out in Fallujah in April of 2004? Was it because it was highly likely that it was not going to do a damn thing to quell the insurgency and would have precipitated this flip in opinion before the November election? I really wonder what exactly we did in Iraq between April and November of last year besides just wait out the presidential election. Maybe there is a smoking gun document on this, too. It seems awfully fishy.
Bush needed the specter of the “Sunni Triangle” to maintain the illusion that there was still a war left to win. The reason he was able to get away with not sweeping into the Sunni Triangle before November is that the beheadings provided him with just that extra boost in anger and deference for many frightened Americans to give him the benefit of the doubt for long enough to cover his butt.
I really wonder if a portion of this war can correctly be labeled “Wag the Dog.”
Of course it’s wag the dog! They are wagging the dog right now with our troops hid out trying to train Iraqi forces to be out there on the front lines….if our soldiers were out front and unafraid over there like they were last year we would have so many more casualities than we do right now. Our troops are hid out as well as possible because if the number of deaths climbs much more steeply SHIT IS GOING TO START HITTING THE FAN BIG TIME AT THIS MOMENT IN AMERICAN/BUSH HISTORY!
Wag the Dog is about the staging of a fictional war.
By far the best candidate for this is the terror “war.”
Over 10 years, two buildings were hit on U.S. soil, inflicting about 5% the number of casualties we suffer from medical accidents in one single year. 2 other buildings were saved, one ostensibly in L.A. in the Y2K attack that was thwarted by one Washington State border guard, the other being a Washington DC building saved by unarmed citizens on the 9/11 flight they helped down in PA.
Other than the brief Afghanistan takeover, there hasn’t even been a mission for the military.
Iraq was a real war that was started on totally fabricated pretexts. We now know that it went so fast because the Iraqi army simply sat out the invasion, to survive to launch a terrorist/guerilla war in the aftermath.
I don’t suspect management of having wanted this resistance to arise, because of the way the public turned against them once it flared up. Management is pretty good at creating public opinion. For the moment I still think they bungled the post-invasion phase.
But since they’re rulers rather than leaders, we can’t take anything they say and do at face value, so I’ll definitely keep an eye out for more evidence of what you’re suggesting here.