August 18, 2004
Support for Bush's Iraq War is crumbling all around him.
More Americans now believe the war was a mistake rather than the right thing to do.
Increasingly, U.S. soldiers are growing disillusioned.
Corporal Jaime Duena told the Boston Globe, "Last year, it was pretty chill; kids ran up to us and waved." But now, "kids throw rocks."
Lance Corporal Kenneth Burke said the invasion had a purpose. But the occupation? "I don't think so," he told the Globe.
Disillusionment has spread even to Republican ranks in Congress. Representative Doug Bereuter, a 26-year Congressman and vice chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is not running for reelection this year.
But he's not leaving quietly.
"It was a mistake to launch that military action," he wrote in a letter to his constituents, according to the AP.
Representative Bereuter took issue with the "inadequate intelligence and faulty conclusions" drawn from it. And he suggested that the Bush Administration may have monkeyed with it.
"Left unresolved for now," he wrote, "is whether intelligence was intentionally misconstrued to justify military action."
Calling the occupation "a dangerous, costly mess," he wrote that "our country's reputation around the world has never been lower and our alliances our weaker."
This is a veteran Republican Congressman talking, remember.
If the war has disillusioned people like him and many U.S. soldiers, the occupation cannot long be sustained.