Quotes of the Day

Americans never really go off to war blithely, eagerly, without thinking about it long and hard. We like to believe we fight not out of choice but out of necessity. Yet as the American public once again faces the prospect of combat in a foreign land, it is with an unease that will not go away. You can hear it if you talk to the early-dinner crowd at the Ocean Breeze Restaurant in famously bellwether Macomb County, Mich. Owner Tom Moragianis voted for President Bush but now is concerned that a prolonged engagement in Iraq could be a mortal blow to an already ailing economy. Or in Chattanooga, Tenn., where people fret that a nearby nuclear-power plant and the hydroelectric dam in the middle of town are being left vulnerable. "The terrorists are still here," says World War II veteran Thomas Murphy. "I really do worry about our troops' being sent overseas and depleting our homeland security." Or at V.F.W. Post 5255 in Lawrenceville, Ga., where Irvin Dougherty reflects on what it was like to be an infantryman in Vietnam and hopes there is still time for Iraq "to come to its senses."

These are not the people who flooded streets around the world recently to protest, nor those who brandished American flags at the Daytona 500. But their soft-spoken and almost reluctant misgivings—the kind that many other Americans expressed in an extensive new TIME/CNN poll—show how unsettled the country is by being asked to wage a kind of war it has never fought before, one launched against a country that has yet to attack the U.S. Such a war requires a new way of thinking about ourselves and poses a question that millions of Americans are now asking: Is it more dangerous, more immoral, to start a war or not to?

Bush and his war council are dismissive of the idea that public opinion matters on a question as momentous as this. Asked last week what he thought of the size of the antiwar demonstrations, the President scoffed that worrying about that would be like "deciding, well, I'm going to decide policy based on a focus group. The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon the security—in this case, the security of the people." And yet while they are sensitive about acknowledging it, Bush's advisers are watching public sentiment carefully. A month ago, a senior official—after insisting on anonymity—ticked off polling data from the Washington Post, Fox News, the Pew Research Center, cbs, cnn, USA Today, Newsweek and Time. "I could go on and on and on," he said impatiently. "The point remains the same. Large majorities of the American people continue to support the use of force to disarm Saddam Hussein."

Or at least a small majority does. The numbers in the latest TIME/CNN survey indicate that Bush has successfully made the case that Saddam Hussein must go: 54% of those surveyed in mid-February said the U.S. should use military action to remove him. That's slightly higher than support on the eve of the Gulf War, and if that conflict is any precedent, approval would surge the moment the first cruise missiles were launched.

But the nation's appetite for waging war against Saddam is significantly lower now than it was only three months after 9/11, when 73% were in favor. The closer we get to war, the more questions Americans seem to have about it. And one of those questions is whether or not, as Bush argues, the war would make us safer. The poll makes it clear that the President has yet to convince a nation living under an orange alert that waging war would better protect Americans from terrorism. Quite the opposite: 56% said sending U.S. military troops into Iraq would increase the number of al-Qaeda attacks in the U.S.

Some of the doubts about going to war reflect long-standing divisions in the body politic: women have more misgivings than men, African Americans more than whites, Democrats and independents more than Republicans. And yet beneath those broad, predictable patterns, say pollsters from both parties who have conducted focus groups, is another, more nuanced picture. It shows a large group of Americans who have absorbed some of Bush's message but have projected their own preoccupations onto it. The result includes some deep reservations but also strong personal connections to the pro-war arguments and to the President who is making them, expressed in the following ways: We need the U.N.

Though respondents to the TIME/CNN poll were nearly evenly divided on the question of whether the U.S. is moving too quickly, and said by better than 2 to 1 that Saddam has already had enough opportunities to comply with U.N.weapons inspections, a healthy plurality (42% to 34%) said the U.S. should send in ground troops to remove Saddam only if the U.N. supported the action. Furthermore, a hefty majority would take the final order away from our Commander in Chief: 57% said the final decision on disarming Iraq should be in the hands of the U.N. Security Council, not the President or Congress.

This represents a significant shift for a country that has prided itself on not needing other nations to pursue its goals. In the early 1990s, public sentiment was 2 to 1 against even paying dues to the U.N. But Americans have gradually become convinced that there is an advantage to going into battle as part of an international coalition, as in first the Gulf War and later Kosovo and elsewhere.

In the post-9/11 world, pollsters suggest, Americans especially don't want to go it alone because they fear it could stir up hatred and makes them an easier target. "They talk about it in very emotional and very real terms," says Democratic pollster Ed Reilly. "Their great fear is that by prosecuting the war without any allies we are essentially inviting a period of terrorism here at home."

But White House officials are convinced that even if the U.S. cannot get the U.N.'s seal of approval, they can assuage public concerns by assembling enough countries to form what they are calling a Coalition of the Willing. "Once the public hears the names of 12 countries they recognize," one says, "they will be reassured."

IS HE THE RIGHT BAD GUY?
Many Americans are worried that the President has taken his eye off the ball, that he has yet to fulfill his promise to root out the perpetrators of 9/11. By 2 to 1, they see Osama bin Laden as a greater threat than Saddam. "We're getting tied up in too many things," says Murphy, 82, the Chattanooga veteran. "We need to get that bunch that bombed the World Trade Center first."

But there is a Bush argument for focusing on Saddam that has gained traction—and that's because it is tied to people's sense of security. Americans say the most compelling reason to disarm Saddam is that he has wantonly killed his own citizens. In the TIME/CNN poll, 83% of respondents ranked that reason as a convincing one for going to war. No. 2, at 72%, was that taking on Saddam would help eliminate weapons of mass destruction. Saddam's cruelty is a rationale Bush unleashed most powerfully in his State of the Union address, cataloging in some detail the Iraqi dictator's atrocities: "The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages, leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind or disfigured. Iraqi refugees tell us how forced confessions are obtained—by torturing children while their parents are made to watch. International human-rights groups have cataloged other methods used in the torture chambers of Iraq—electric shock, burning with hot irons, dripping acid on the skin, mutilation with electric drills, cutting out tongues and rape."

Pollsters suggest voters are seeing a connection between the first and second reasons for attacking Iraq—a connection related to self-interest: if Saddam can do terrible things to his own citizens, then he is capable of anything, which is all the more reason he is a threat to the U.S. Republican pollster David Winston describes what he hears from focus-group members in these terms: "He's an evil guy who's going to do bad things, and we know it."

WHAT ABOUT MY 401(K)?
barbara dietz was well into midlife before she cast her first ballot for President. "I just wanted Bush to be President so much I had to vote," she says. But as she shopped last week in a Macomb County mall, the dental assistant, 48, was worried that the President she had so ardently supported had misplaced his priorities. "Everybody is afraid of the impact on the economy," she says. "Right now he's focused on the war to the exclusion of everything else."

Public approval of Bush's handling of Iraq remains higher than the public assessment of how he has managed the economy. Concerns like Dietz's may be why 61% in the TIME/CNN poll said they believe a war with Iraq would weaken the economy. Such worries also help explain why Americans don't seem to have much appetite for a long war—or a long cleanup. The cost of a prolonged engagement may be why half said the U.S. should stay in Iraq only as long as it takes to stabilize the country rather than undertake the much lengthier task of completely rebuilding it. "If it's long, it won't be good for anybody," says restaurant owner Moragianis, who adds that the real problems may start when the shooting stops. "There are a lot of different groups in Iraq and the (Muslim) world that are going to cause trouble for the American military."

The reluctance to invest too much time and money in reconstructing Iraq suggests that Bush may run into resistance this week as he begins, in a speech Wednesday, to expand on the reasons for an invasion. He plans to argue that eliminating a threat to U.S. security is the first goal but that the broader aims include liberating the people of Iraq and building a nation that is stable, peaceful and democratic in a region that needs an example of all three. The idea is to appeal to American nobility and to align this war with the struggles that liberated Europe, first from the Nazis and then from the Soviets. But it could have the opposite effect, stirring America's fear of entanglement in a dangerous, unstable region.

IN BUSH WE TRUST
Again and again in interviews last week, Americans told TIME that their faith in Bush is what ultimately overcomes their reservations about his policy in Iraq. They trust that the leader they saw after 9/11 will not mislead them about the dangers that Saddam poses. Dietz's husband Richard, for one, is convinced that Bush knows a lot more than he's letting on publicly. "He is keeping a lot from us to protect us," he says. "If he says there's something there, I'm behind the President." Winston says Bush has become a kind of touchstone of people's faith. "People may not always agree with him, but they trust him," he says. Which is why the President has staked so much of the rationale for war on his own credibility and why many Americans will continue to go along with him—as long as he turns out to be right.

—With reporting by Anne Berryman/Lawrenceville, James Carney/ Washington, Elizabeth Kauffman/Chattanooga and Maggie Sieger/Macomb

• Karen Tumulty