Americans’ anger at an all-time high
10/18/2005 8:46:00 PM GMT
Americans have become increasingly frustrated with their President’s Iraq policy.
According to most recent surveys, just 28 percent of Americans think the president is doing a good job, the lowest in a decade. But pollsters say that even without running a poll; just wandering down to the local coffee shops you will see the amount of anger and frustration as a result of Iraq war, the mounting casualties, skyrocketing energy prices and the government’s policy.
“More and more Americans are angry,” says retired Gen. Wesley Clark, a Democratic presidential candidate in 2004. “They are angry about the president's incompetence and his general unwillingness to acknowledge with some humility that he has made some terrible and tragic mistakes regarding the mission in Iraq.”
Last month, thousands of American anti-war protesters, carrying signs that read "Bush Lied, Thousands Died," and "End the Occupation," rallied in Washington and other U.S. cities demanding the return of U.S. troops and the end of Iraq war- It was the largest gathering since the war began in March 2003.
"We believe we are at a tipping point whereby the anti-war sentiment has now become the majority sentiment," said Brian Becker, national coordinator for ANSWER, a famous antiwar group.
It’s not just the Democrats or liberals who’re angry at Bush’s policy, but also conservatives and Republicans show increasing dissatisfaction with Bush's policy.
Steven M. Warshawsky, a conservative commentator says that “Bush clearly has retreated from the promise he made to the country on September 20, 2001, the night he declared the War on Terror”.
“The entire conceptual framework underlying the Bush Doctrine has been replaced, in just a few short years, with a Vietnam-era retread. RIP the Bush Doctrine.”
“Our country today finds itself more bitterly divided than at any time since the Viet Nam War. From the party of the loyal opposition on down, we have been what I suspect is a silent majority of dissenters. But the time for silence is now over,” says Jeff Birkenstein in Counterpunch. “The silence is ending and the people are beginning to make their voices heard.”
We all see the wide gap between what Bush’s administration states and battlefield realities. Contrary to the U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s prewar prediction that the fighting “could last six days, six weeks, I doubt six months,” most of the U.S. military deaths took place since Bush declared “major combat” was over in May 1 2003.
There has long been frustration among the Americans, but what’s new today is that frustrations about Bush’s Iraq policy are being voiced by those who originally backed and encouraged the war.
An editorial at The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, says that "In the case of Iraq, the American public has failed its soldiers,” “we did not prevent the Bush administration from spending their blood in an unnecessary war based on contrived concerns about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. President Bush and those around him lied, and the rest of us let him. Harsh? Yes. True? Also yes.”
“For us to be loyal Americans, we can't be random and hypocritical about it. For years, being American has supposedly meant being unified as one and supporting equality on all levels, from gender to class to race. The land of the free and the equal seems to be the land of the confused and the phony. Let's get it together.”
The Americans need to step back and think, is their president taking their nation to prosperity or to hell?
On the other hand, the U.S. is trying to interfere in the Middle East policy despite the firestorm of criticism from many of Arab nations because of its intervention, by imposing American-style reforms, claiming it’s part of its mission to bring democracy to the Third World Nations.
Bush’s admin needs to concentrate on the U.S. internal problem before it loses the little support left from the American public.
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