ABSTRACT
The Iraq War involved major, and profoundly controversial, assertions of unilateral presidential authority. Most Americans supported President George W. Bush’s decision to invade a country that had not attacked the United States. Opposition to the war encompassed neither Cabinet resignations nor mass demonstrations on the scale seen in the capital of the United States’ fellowinvader, the United Kingdom. American opposition to, and ambivalence about, the war was reflected in public opinion polling; but there was no parallel to some of the extraordinary poll results found in Western Europe. (In February 2003, Saddam Hussein and President George W.Bush were competing for the title of ‘greatest threat to world peace’.)1
The early years of the twenty-first century saw an apparent widening of the Atlantic Ocean. Nevertheless, contrary to widespread European perceptions, Americans did not spend these years in a state of uninformed, blinkered and super-patriotic sentiment. Bush, after all, was a controversial leader, whose authority stemmed from the most disputed election in modern presidential history (His 2000 electoral opponent, Al Gore, was one of the first leading Democrats to criticize the administration’s line on Iraq in 2002. He described Saddam and his regime as a ‘serious threat’ to the Middle East, not an ‘imminent threat’ requiring an American invasion.)2 Timidity and self-censorship are natural characteristics of times of (real or imagined) national crisis. However, the American political process is sufficiently fragmented and multi-centred to weather such dangers. Congressional debates and actions on the war were disappointing to those participants who sought to limit the president’s discretionary authority. For Senator Robert C.Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat who emerged as the leading proponent of legislative war powers, Congress was irresponsibly allowing the executive to attack ‘any nation that the President, and the President alone, determines to be a threat’.3 Yet, the democratic process did at least allow the airing of a variety of views. According to Marcy Katpur (Democrat, Ohio) in the House of Representatives’ war debate of September 2002, ‘the driving force of this potential war on Iraq is oil’.4 Similar points apply to the American media. Americans were bombarded with debates on military action-many of them generating little more than earnestness and emotion. William Powers wrote in late March 2003: ‘Turn on CNN one recent Sunday, and you could catch Bianca Jagger earnestly debating actor Ron Silver on the merits of war.’5
