As the American casualties mount, attitudes shift

09:35 AM EDT on Saturday, May 1, 2004

BY JENNIFER LEVITZ
Journal Staff Writer

AP photo U.S. troops with the 1st Battalion 5th Marines continue to patrol the outskirts of Fallujah, Iraq, yesterday. They may soon, however, withdraw from this embattled city, handing over responsibilty to an all-Iraqi force.

Jennifer Rose noticed the difference after the welcome-home party in Cranston two weeks ago, after the feast with mom's eggplant and D'Angelo sandwiches and Shaw's vanilla cake with the American flag on the frosting.

All those friends who'd bragged about her husband, Rhode Island National Guardsman Sgt. Edward Rose, while he was at war, started speaking in grim tones about the U.S military mission in Iraq.

"Some of those people who said, 'Oh, we're so proud of him,' " Rose 27, said, "now they are saying things like, 'we don't belong there.' "

The doubts about the Bush administration's steering of the war in Iraq are rising, according to experts who study public opinion, as April ends with the highest number of U.S. casualties in a month. Tomorrow marks one year since President Bush stood on an aircraft carrier and declared the mission accomplished.

In an interview yesterday, William Schneider, a senior political analyst for CNN, said the majority of Americans are still behind the mission in Iraq, but they now believe the administration isn't executing it in the right way.

Schneider, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., said many Americans think that "the Bush administration doesn't seem to have a plan."

"They don't understand what we're doing, how we're going to get out of there."

Kathleen Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said the heavy casualties this month and prolonged fighting in Fallujah make it a crucial time in public opinion.

People in the United States are making up their minds on how they view the war in Iraq, she said yesterday in an interview.

Attitudes change when expectations are not met, she said, and people are measuring their expectations against what they are seeing on TV -- bombings, night goggles, images of real fighting.

Americans are comparing those wartime sights with what they are hearing from the administration -- that the electricity is back in Iraq, and schools are open, and that only small parts of the country are unstable.

They are asking, she said, "Is what I'm seeing on TV consistent with what I'm being told by the administration?"

Jamieson said that when the public starts asking itself these questions, "you have the potential" for an attitude shift.

It will be interesting to see, she said, how the public reacts to tonight's Nightline TV broadcast. Ted Koppel, anchor of the ABC show, will read the names of more than 500 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. Some TV stations are refusing to air the show, saying it is politically motivated to undermine support for the war.

When Life magazine published a spread of the dead soldiers during the Vietnam War, she said, there was controversy. The photos forced people to confront the issue: had these soldiers sacrificed their lives for a just cause, or were their deaths a tragic waste?

Shannon Enos, 22, supports the Nightline broadcast.

Her husband, Army Specialist Peter G. Enos, of South Dartmouth, Mass., died in Bayji, Iraq, on April 9, a week before his 25th birthday. A rocket-propelled grenade struck his patrol car.

To Enos, putting her husband's face on national TV is the right thing to do, as is questioning the war.

"I applaud it," she said. "Too many people just get caught up in the numbers. These men and women are not numbers. My husband was not a number."

Enos, an Army veteran herself, came out with a statement after her husband's death saying she supported the troops.

"But it starts to make me sick when I see all these men dying," she said in an interview yesterday. "Bush keeps trying to talk about all the good things. I'm sorry, but when Americans are still dying on a daily basis, it's hard to see any positive."

The family of Specialist Michael Andrade, of Warren, is now wondering why he died. Andrade, a 28-year-old National Guardsman, died Sept. 24 on a road north of Baghdad when a fuel truck collided with his Humvee.

On the day of his funeral, his friends and family pinned buttons with Michael in his National Guard uniform to their suit lapels, and some wore tiny gold star pins, gifts from the military. His sister, Fatima Milhomens, had always supported what Andrade wanted to do.

Now, she speaks freely about Iraq, and it's not in support. She can't stand to watch the news and see another loss.

"You can see it's not working out," she said. "They've been there for almost a year and nothing has come out of it that I can see."

Perhaps one of the best indicators of public sentiment comes from Larry Syverson, a geologist who oversees landfills for the state of Virginia.

He is a member of a group called Military Families Speak Out, which was started from a cluttered dining room in Jamaica Plain, Mass. Organizers say there are 1,500 members, all with family fighting in Iraq. They've picketed at the gates of Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, and marched in Boston and Washington, D.C. They've called for the government to end its ban on photographing the flag-draped coffins of U.S. soldiers when they arrive at Dover.

Syverson, 55, has spent his lunch hour every Monday, Wednesday and Friday since March 19, 2003, in front of the Federal Courthouse in Richmond, Va. He carries several antiwar signs, including one with the latest U.S. casualty count from Iraq. Two of his sons are in the Army and stationed in Iraq.

At first, he said in an interview, people would yell and when he glanced up, "they would shoot me the finger."

Last May 1, when the president announced the end of major combat operations from the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, "people were real surly. They started telling me to go home. Hadn't I read the newspaper? The war is over."

But, he said, "as the number of soldiers killed and the dangers increased, the more honks I got."

Then spring came, and four U.S. contract workers were mutilated and killed and the April death toll of U.S. soldiers topped 120.

"This month has been just unbelievable," he said, of the honks and thumbs-up signs. "It's construction workers and minivans with American flags, young guys in sports cars. It's basically America."

As of yesterday, according to the Associated Press, 126 U.S. troops had died in combat in Iraq in April, the worst month for U.S. forces in the war. At least 736 U.S. troops have died in Iraq since the war began in March 2003, according to the Associated Press.

Darrell M. West, a professor of political science at Brown University, said yesterday there has not been an active antiwar movement. He hasn't seen many people protesting or demonstrating. He sees the troops being treated with respect upon their return, and he sees Governor Carcieri greeting each group that comes back to the Rhode Island National Guard base at Quonset.

But he does see a growing doubt.

"We've now spent 160 billion," he said, "we have had more than 500 troops killed. That's getting the attention of the general public and some people are concluding that it's not worth it."