Slinking Away With Our Tail Between Our Legs

Mr. Shakes passes on this article from MSNBC, reporting on the results of a major new study completed by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Council on Foreign Relations, released yesterday. The study found that, similar to the post-Vietnam era, there is emerging an isolationist streak among Americans, “with more than two-fifths saying the United States should mind its own business.” What’s most interesting, however, is the disparity of opinion between elites and the hoi polloi.

The results, which are reported separately, paint a vivid picture of an America deeply at odds with those whom it pays to do its thinking for it.

If anything, the “influentials” (the report’s shorthand for its sample of opinion leaders) are even gloomier about America’s world prospects than the public as a whole. For example, 37 percent of Americans as a whole believe the U.S. effort to establish a stable democracy in Iraq will fail, but that view is held by 84 percent of scientists, 71 percent of foreign affairs specialists and 63 percent of journalists.

Meanwhile, while 44 percent of Americans believe the war in Iraq has damaged the international struggle against terrorism, higher percentages in every opinion leader category hold that view — including military leaders and 82 percent of those who study foreign affairs for a living.

And, except for military leaders, all of the categories of “influentials” are more downbeat about prospects for democracy in the Middle East. Even then, only 34 percent of the public (and the same percentage of military leaders) believe it will ever happen; by comparison, only 17 percent of foreign affairs specialists and 14 percent of security experts agree.

34%, huh? Where have I heard that number before? Oh, yeah—that’s President Bush’s latest approval rating. What a coinkydink. I guess when you win an election based on the exclusive premise that you’re the only one capable of running a war, and that war increasingly comes to be seen as the disaster it is, your job approval would track pretty damn closely with optimism about the successful realization of your stated war objective.

In any case, though the average American ding-dong seems to be wrong about just about everything else, they do seem to have been right about one thing: George Bush is indeed, despite his privileged upbringing and Ivy League education, one of them—irrationality convinced, against all evidence to the contrary, that we’re going to “win” an unwinnable war.