Digging In For A Fight

JOHN MOORE/AP
FRONTLINE: Marines laying siege to Fallujah are briefed by their commander

However a government may try to hide them, there are ways to measure the costs of war, and last week people could take their pick. You could see, for the first time, the coffins of dead soldiers, wrapped tight like a gift in the flag for which they fought. You could mourn the one whose name was familiar, the football star who took a million-dollar pay cut to defend his country after 9/11. You could listen, for the first time, to the Pentagon leaders admitting that they would need both more troops and more money to get the job done. A year ago, the war planners figured that 200 armored humvees would be enough for the invasion and occupation of Iraq; now they want 20 times that many. The U.S. death toll in April 2003, the month Baghdad fell, was 37; the number killed in hostilities in April 2004 climbed to 107 last week, a reminder that winning a war can be deadlier than fighting it in the first place. "There's a rumor that Bush is going to redeclare war here. Have you heard it?" asks a 1st Cavalry Division private on patrol as he mans a machine gun in a Baghdad slum. "It's a good idea. Right now we drive around just enough to get people really angry and let them take shots at us. We should just roll over Sadr City and take out all the bad guys."

If the commentariat supposed that all the bad news on the ground would bring political costs, the polls held surprises too. As the U.S. returns to a war footing and braces for what comes next, people are paying close attention. In surveys last week, twice as many listed the war among their top concerns as did just a month ago. But the escalating bloodshed seemed, if anything, to make people lean forward and dig in for the fight. A Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 51% of Americans still believed the war was worth fighting--3 percentage points higher than in February. According to a USA Today poll, support for sending more troops has tripled since January, to 33%.

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In interviews from Georgia to California, TIME heard voters expressing a sober mix of resignation and resolution. Hindsight is 20/20, people say of the failures in war planning. We made this mess, and we have to clean it up, they say of the task ahead. They'll hate us no matter what we do, they say of the enemy. I wouldn't want to be in his shoes, they say of the President. Even as voters fault George W. Bush's judgment, many praise his instincts. "I don't think he has the faculties of his father," says Steve Guest, a computer engineer in Cincinnati, Ohio, "but he has the resolve, and that's what matters." A less admiring observer, Matt Streng, a health-care teacher in Chapel Hill, N.C., sees the public's mood a little differently: "They have blind faith in a President who has blind faith in his cause," he says.

--HOW MANY SOLDIERS WILL IT TAKE?
War and tyranny can make a country go mad, and it's pretty clear that in Iraq there's no such thing as a quick recovery. The Americans promise the Iraqis that once things are calm, we'll truly let you run things. But the Iraqis reply that until they are running things, there will be no calm. It is hard to accept the Pentagon's hearty insistence that the scattered attacks in Iraq are just the work of a few thousand Iraqi dead-enders backed by foreign fighters when so much of the country has become so impossibly dangerous in just the past few weeks when drivers trying to move around Baghdad, even in the supposedly safe neighborhoods, now run into checkpoints manned by insurgents looking for foreigners to confront or kidnap; when Iraqi police officers strip off their uniforms before heading home for fear of being tarred as collaborators with the hated occupiers; when contractors are confined to their walled compounds because they risk voiding their life-insurance policies if they venture out into the country they are expected to rebuild.

If anything, the American public has shown itself more willing than the government to confront the implications of Iraq's bloody spring. When he invaded Iraq with barely four divisions last year, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wasn't just trying to win a war; he was trying to make a point that the U.S.'s post cold war Army could do more with less and do it better and faster. That proved right as far as the invasion went, but occupying the country was a different matter entirely. "The notion that with [about] 130,000 troops, we have sufficient numbers to provide security is patently wrong," says Ivo Daalder, who was on the National Security Council staff under Clinton and is now at the Brookings Institution. "We need at least twice as many to make sure that the streets in Baghdad are safe enough for people to go out and shop let alone take care of the counterinsurgency."

When Eric Shinseki, then the Army Chief of Staff, testified publicly before the war that it could take "several hundred thousand troops" to occupy Iraq, he found himself a general non grata, and the rest of the brass got the message. A year later, junior officers are no longer holding their tongues. "He wants to wage a war consistent with this fantasy of what a war is rather than what it is in reality," an Army officer at the Pentagon says privately of Rumsfeld. "It's this bulls___ notion that you can have an efficient military instead of an effective one."