The Doubts Of War

Americans never really go off to war blithely, eagerly, without thinking about it long and hard. We like to believe we fight not out of choice but out of necessity. Yet as the American public once again faces the prospect of combat in a foreign land, it is with an unease that will not go away. You can hear it if you talk to the early-dinner crowd at the Ocean Breeze Restaurant in famously bellwether Macomb County, Mich. Owner Tom Moragianis voted for President Bush but now is concerned that a prolonged engagement in Iraq could be a mortal blow to an already ailing economy. Or in Chattanooga, Tenn., where people fret that a nearby nuclear-power plant and the hydroelectric dam in the middle of town are being left vulnerable. "The terrorists are still here," says World War II veteran Thomas Murphy. "I really do worry about our troops' being sent overseas and depleting our homeland security." Or at V.F.W. Post 5255 in Lawrenceville, Ga., where Irvin Dougherty reflects on what it was like to be an infantryman in Vietnam and hopes there is still time for Iraq "to come to its senses."

These are not the people who flooded streets around the world recently to protest, nor those who brandished American flags at the Daytona 500. But their soft-spoken and almost reluctant misgivings--the kind that many other Americans expressed in an extensive new TIME/CNN poll--show how unsettled the country is by being asked to wage a kind of war it has never fought before, one launched against a country that has yet to attack the U.S. Such a war requires a new way of thinking about ourselves and poses a question that millions of Americans are now asking: Is it more dangerous, more immoral, to start a war or not to?

Bush and his war council are dismissive of the idea that public opinion matters on a question as momentous as this. Asked last week what he thought of the size of the antiwar demonstrations, the President scoffed that worrying about that would be like "deciding, well, I'm going to decide policy based on a focus group. The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon the security--in this case, the security of the people." And yet while they are sensitive about acknowledging it, Bush's advisers are watching public sentiment carefully. A month ago, a senior official--after insisting on anonymity--ticked off polling data from the Washington Post, Fox News, the Pew Research Center, CBS, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek and TIME. "I could go on and on and on," he said impatiently. "The point remains the same. Large majorities of the American people continue to support the use of force to disarm Saddam Hussein."

Or at least a small majority does. The numbers in the latest TIME-CNN survey indicate that Bush has successfully made the case that Saddam Hussein must go: 54% of those surveyed in mid-February said the U.S. should use military action to remove him. That's slightly higher than support on the eve of the Gulf War, and if that conflict is any precedent, approval would surge the moment the first cruise missiles were launched.