THINKING FOR OURSELVES

Highs, Lows and Political Courage

By Shea Howell

Michigan Citizen, May 13-19, 2007

It is no surprise to anyone that President Bush’s approval rating has sunk to an all-time low. Newsweek released a new poll showing that only 28% of the public approve of his handling of the presidency. This is lower than any rating for any president in 30 years. It is lower than that given to Bush Sr. at his worst. Only Jimmy Carter, in the midst of the Iranian hostage crisis, reached such depths.

One aspect of the poll that received little attention was a question about political courage. Pollsters asked which president showed the greatest political courage. Who did people think was willing to make the right decisions, even if it jeopardized his popularity? Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan topped the list with 18% each. George W. Bush received only 4% of the votes. When asked directly, 55% responded they do not believe Bush is politically courageous and 62%, nearly two out of three responding, believe his recent actions show he is “stubborn and unwilling to admit his mistakes.”

Bush’s effort to portray himself as willing to risk popular support to do the right thing is failing. Most people do not believe he is acting out of personal courage but out of persistent stubbornness.

At the same time as Bush’s popularity reaches new lows, the death toll in Iraq has reached new heights. The month of April has been reported as the deadliest month so far this year with more than 100 deaths of American soldiers. For Iraqis the toll is nearly 3,000 lives lost. There is no doubt that the surge strategy, placing soldiers in small outposts throughout Baghdad and neighboring cities, is increasing the vulnerability of everyone.

Meanwhile, neither the low support for Bush nor the escalating death toll has translated into the political will to end this war.

Part of the reason for this has to do with the something much deeper than Bush, Congress or the complicated efforts to stop military spending. Most of us have yet to confront the deeper question of why we are in Iraq in the first place. We have lacked the political courage to explore the fact that this war is about much more than the misadventure of an administration drunk on it own power. It is about much more than the American people being sold a pack of lies about terrorism and weapons of horror.

This war is about the willingness of U.S. leaders to go to any lengths to protect the American way of life. It is also about the unwillingness of most of us to give up any of the vast resources of the world that we have come to think of as ours to use and abuse.

Many of us are willing to say this is a war about oil, implying that the motive is really to make money for Bush the oilman and his friends. But it is also about the oil that we each depend on everyday. It is about the way we believe we have a right to access all the resources of the Earth, to use, abuse and throw away with astonishing carelessness in the name of our way of life.

To end this war, and prevent yet another, we must find the political courage to look at our own ways of living. For far too long we have taken the vast resources and precious labor of most of the world to support a way of life that is inherently unsustainable. Stopping this war means we have to find the political courage to live more simply so that others may simply live.

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