I almost don’t want to comment on this excerpt from a Fox News interview that Dick Cheney gave on January 14th
CHENEY: Polls change day by day, week by week. I think the vast majority of Americans want the right outcome in Iraq. The challenge for us is to be able to provide that. But you cannot simply stick your finger up in the wind and say, “Gee, public opinion’s against; we’d better quit.”
That is part and parcel of the underlying fundamental strategy that our adversaries believe afflicts the United States. They are convinced that the current debate in the Congress, that the election campaign last fall, all of that, is evidence that they’re right when they say the United States doesn’t have the stomach for the fight in this long war against terror.
They believe it. They look at past evidence of it: in Lebanon in ‘83 and Somalia in ‘93, Vietnam before that. They’re convinced that the United States will, in fact, pack it in and go home if they just kill enough of us. They can’t beat us in a stand-up fight, but they think they can break our will.
And if we have a president who looks at the polls and sees the polls are going south and concludes, “Oh, my goodness, we have to quit,” all it will do is validate the Al Qaeda view of the world.
It’s exactly the wrong thing to do. This president does not make policy based on public opinion polls; he should not. It’s absolutely essential here that we get it right.
So… *contains sad laughter* Public opinion is just kids’ play, throw’em a bone or something. We know what we have to do and nobody can tell us otherwise!
Yeah I can see that policies must go beyond the ocasional change of support that a president may receive from its people; but how brief is brief? ‘Cause these guys have had lower and lower support for the past 4 years and they’re sticking to their guns. Is there really no limit, is this really the US policy for the next 40 years [read the rest of the article.]
I gotta get a flight out to Mars…
