GEORGIE ANNE GEYER Americans don't back unilateral policies

WASHINGTON -- Ever since the Iraq war started, one of the questions that have baffled many of us in Washington and across the country is what the American people were thinking.
Why was there so little outcry on the part of responsible citizens to our leaders' carrying us into a reasonless and self-indulgent war? Why were so few incensed by the persistent camouflaging of intentions, by the exercise of agendas so foreign to America's historical principles and interests?
Yes, there were brave shows of resistance, but they never reached the level of advocacy that could genuinely affect government policy -- perhaps until now. We are beginning to get some clues about what Americans are thinking.
The new Pew Research Center survey, done in association with the Council on Foreign Relations, of 2,006 Americans and 520 specialists in foreign affairs, security, religion, science, engineering and the military (in the interests of transparency, I should note that I was one of those surveyed) revealed some dramatic insights into thinking on the war.
In short, isolationist feelings are growing in the country -- feelings remarkably similar to those that followed both the Vietnam War in the 1970s and the end of the Cold War in the 1990s. Americans are feeling less unilateralist and more multilateralist. In every section, there was less support for the Bush goals of force-feeding "democracy" around the world. A more direct rebuke to the entire dogma of this administration could scarcely be found.
Not U.S. business
Fully 42 percent in the general public agreed with the statement that the U.S. should "mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own" -- up from 30 percent in a related poll of December 2002, four months before the Iraq war started.
Again in the public part of the survey (which comprised random surveying with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points), nearly three-quarters said the U.S. should play a shared leadership role, and only 25 percent wanted the country to be the most active in international leadership.
In findings paralleling other recent polls and surveys, majorities from both the public and the opinion leader sectors said they disapproved of how the president is handling his job, with 52 percent of the public expressing disapproval and opinion leaders expressing higher levels.
Two-thirds of both groups surveyed said there was less international respect for the U.S. than in the past, with 71 percent of the public group and 88 percent of opinion leaders citing the war in Iraq as the major reason for America's precipitous decline in prestige.
The Pew/Council report stated that the Iraq war "has had a profound impact" on the way opinion leaders and the public "view America's global role, looming international threats and the Bush administration's stewardship of the nation's foreign policy."
These findings are supported by virtually every other current poll and survey. But what is unique about this one is the strong rejection of just about every facet, principle and ideological position that has informed the thinking and actions of the small band of zealots who took over this country five years ago and led it to where we are today.
Great American Empire
Remember their dreams of the Great American Empire, right there at our fingertips? Instead we are hanging on in Iraq by our fingernails. Polls such as this show clearly that the American people remain a practical and pragmatic citizenry with little stomach for taking over the world.
Remember the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld delusion, put into practice by their radical neocon deputies (many of them now melted into the woodwork) that we could -- indeed, must -- unilaterally rule the world, brushing off those silly and irrelevant other countries as they pulled on our pant legs, dying to take part in the great neocon American adventure?
It looks as though the American people actually WANT the "shared leadership" role in the world that Father Bush so exemplified -- and that Son Bush so petulantly despises.
Remember the idea, still extant in some corners of the administration, that the U.S. will and must democratize Iraq and, indeed, the entire Middle East, regardless?
Universal Press Syndicate