The Will Stalemate

This may be somewhat belated, but the Pew Research Center has published a public opinion poll with some interesting numbers for Iraq that can be turned into something useful. The gist of it:

"However, a rosier view of the military situation in Iraq has not translated into increased support for maintaining U.S. forces in Iraq, greater optimism that the United States will achieve its goals there, or an improvement in President Bush's approval ratings. "

Despite the fluctuations in the perception of the conduct, the desire for withdrawal has been largely static, shifting only about two or three points at the most, and even then, not in a consistent or statistically significant manner. While the majority favors withdrawal, this isn't as important as the fact that the numbers haven't really moved all year.

This is what we're interested in because this is indicative of political will. As it stands, the political will to see this war out (or not) has remained stable all year. It has remained stable despite every variable that might reasonably be expected to influence it (and there are dozens), including the actual conduct of the war. This says something very important about American political will.

First and foremost, the political dust cleared long ago, and few people find themselves in a state of conflict over the war; they know where they stand, wherever that happens to be. We won't see many ship-jumpers on either side unless there is a very significant turn one way or another in the conduct of the war. To put that in perspective, nothing in the past year has changed the numbers on political will in a statistically relevant way (more than the+/- 3% margin of error), and a lot has happened this past year. So any shift, negative or positive, would have to be fairly massive to yield any relevant result; everyone is set in their ways, at this point. It wouldn't have to be instantaneous, but it would have to obvious.

That in turn means that from the ground, we're going to need more than the cautious optimism that's been getting so much airtime if we want to win political support. Cautious optimism might be the right way to go for right now, and I'm certain that it is, but to gain will, we need to be able to start dropping "cautious" from that statement. Fortunately there's no rush.

For all of the anti-war crowd's hooting, their efforts are also meeting with exactly zero significant change. The public at large is immune to "cautious" events, but they're also immune to the bilious narrative of the anti-war arguments, which again indicates that most people have made up their minds on the matter, and brings us to the second point we can extract from this data: the public at large doesn't care about political chatter. If that doesn't put the impotent nature of bloviating in the halls of Congress into perspective, there's little that can. Harry Reid can use the word "intractable" as much as he wants, and it will not affect the political will of the nation.

If one can draw two fundamental attributions from this, it is that A) Americans have little use for finesse - a carefully qualified statement saying "we might be winning" is no statement at all; and B) they do not buy as much of the hype as either side would like to imagine - Bush isn't brainwashing anyone new, and the anti-war groups are still teeming with the same groups of college freshmen. And the only thing likely to change that is something that everyone can plainly see.

For the left, it means it's time to drop the stagnant arguments about the nature of the war, the nature of the president, and the efficacy of the surge and come up with something new. For the right, it means doing exactly as they are: pushing for political progress and even more security gains, because that can create the obvious evidence that Americans will respond to.