Was the U.S. invasion of Iraq ever popular?

I remember the country turning against the war, but did the country ever really support the war?

Democrats won control of Congress in 2006, in part because the catastrophic War On Terror™ turned voters against Bush and Republicans. At least that’s how I remember it.

This morning I read a newspaper column I wrote in November 2002 (13 months after the Afghanistan invasion, 5 months before the Iraq invasion). It was about public opinion polling and whether the then-pending invasion of Iraq actually had the support of the public.

Was the Iraq war ever popular with the American public? It depended on how pollsters asked the question. Me in 2002:

To witness first-hand how small wording changes can alter answers, try asking these two questions next you’re at a bar. Question : Do you enjoy having sex? Question : Do you enjoy having sex with me?”

I then share bits of a Pew Research Center poll from October 2002 showing that a majority of Americans favored the invasion in general, but a majority disapproved of an invasion if there were significant U.S. casualties or we proceeded without support from allies.

Put another way, the public approved of the hypothetical best-case scenario (an internationally supported invasion with few casualties) that was sold to them by Bush and credulous journalists, but the public disapproved of a go-it-alone invasion that killed and injured huge numbers of people, which is what countless people who were actually paying attention (ex. me!) warned was about to happen.

Americans didn’t really support what the war was going to be. They only supported the fantasy version. 

Speaking of fantasies, check out how much a 3-bedroom house with a yard cost in East Atlanta in 2002. From the classifieds of the same November 2002 issue of Creative Loafing:

My column from that week, if you’re curious.

Who is Viktor Bout?

The U.S. just got WNBA player Brittney Griner out of a Russian prison by trading imprisoned (in the U.S.) international arms dealer Viktor Bout. Bout has run guns for some of your favorite armies, including for the U.S. I wrote about him in 2007.

From August 2007:

Who is Victor Bout?

For several months, the White House and Pentagon have been telling the American public Iran is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American troops in Iraq.

According to the U.S. government, media reports and two Iraq war veterans I’ve spoken to, militants in Iraq frequently attack American vehicles with Iranian-made explosives specially formed to penetrate armor.

Asked earlier this year whether he thought the Iranian government was responsible for sending the weapons to Iraq, President Bush offered this sarcastic reply: “What’s worse? That the government knew — or that the government didn’t know?”

Aww, snap!

How will the Iranian Ministry of Snappy Comebacks ever top that?

Turns out it doesn’t need to.

Last month, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported the Pentagon lost 30 percent of the weapons it sent to Iraq between 2004 and 2007.

That’s 80,000 pistols and 110,000 AK-47 rifles purchased for Iraq’s military and police services gone missing.

What happened to these weapons? If the Pentagon knows, it isn’t saying.

They may be sitting in a warehouse somewhere. They may be in crates with checkered table cloths on top being used as dinner tables.

Or they may be in the hands of Iraqi insurgents and militia fighters, the people sending American soldiers and Marines home on stretchers and in coffins.

And the worst part: The Pentagon should have known its methods of funneling resources into Iraq were so insecure that a major security breach, such as 190,000 guns going missing, was inevitable.

The military doesn’t have enough transport capacity to move people, arms, equipment, food and fuel around on its own. It relies on private shippers. Among them is a man named Victor Bout (pronounced boot), thought to be one of the world’s pre-eminent black-market weapons merchants.

Born in Tajikistan of Russian parents, Bout came to prominence in the late 1990s for arming brutal civil wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Angola — the wars that introduced the phrase “blood diamond” into our vocabularies. He reportedly owns a large fleet of cargo aircraft and has a reputation for being able to get large amounts of almost every weapon imaginable to the remotest of locations. The United Nations and Human Rights Watch have been complaining about him for nearly a decade. A guest on an Aug. 4, 2001, CNN program called him “a kingpin in the illegal small-arms trade.”

For a while in the 1990s, Bout armed the anti-Taliban forces of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Then, in 1995, one of his planes was reportedly captured by Taliban forces.

What some people might have considered a problem, Bout’s organization considered an opportunity. Western intelligence agencies believe Bout used his group’s encounter with the Taliban to make an arms deal. He switched sides and reportedly sold some $50 million of weapons to the Taliban in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In other words, Bout was arming the people who sheltered the terrorists who executed 9/11.

After 9/11, the U.S. government went after Bout. The Treasury Department tried to shut him down by going after his money.

Apparently the Pentagon didn’t get the memo.

Pentagon contractors hired Bout’s planes to move equipment in and out of Baghdad. Among the cargo Bout’s planes were supposed to have shipped: guns for Iraqi military and police.

In other words, the Pentagon paid a well-known double-dealer who sold tanks and guns to the Taliban to fly weapons into Iraq — at the same time the Treasury Department was trying to shut him down.

How many of the missing 190,000 guns were shipped by Bout is unclear. What’s clear, however, is that the missing 190K is just the tip of an iceberg.

Washington Post reporter Douglas Farah and L.A. Times reporter Stephen Braun have just co-authored a book about Bout that claims the United States paid him to ship 200,000 AK-47s to Iraq from Bosnia in 1994. The GAO and Pentagon have no clue where those weapons are now.

Braun and Farah’s book is titled, appropriately, Merchant of Death.