Of course the other possibility is that Gut would never even get around to considering the probability of the scenario. The administration’s warnings were frightening, its language vivid—“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”—and the emotions it evoked may have been enough to overwhelm any intuitive consideration of the odds. As Lessner put it, “I, for one, am more concerned about a smoking ruin in an American city than a smoking gun pointing to Saddam.” To hell with probability.
“Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent,” Bush continued in his 2003 State of the Union address. “Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late.”
This theme—we must act now if there is any chance of this happening in the future—appeared repeatedly in White House statements leading up to the Iraq war. In The One Percent Doctrine, a book by Ron Suskind, a Washington journalist with remarkable access to the capital’s back rooms, it is traced to Vice President Dick Cheney. Immediately after 9/11, writes Suskind, Cheney directed that “if there was even a one percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction—and there has been a small probability of such an occurrence for some time—the United States must now act as if it were a certainty.” In effect, if not in name, Cheney was invoking the precautionary principle.
This is a contradiction that goes to the heart of the politics of risk. On the left, the precautionary principle is revered. It is enshrined in European Union law. Environmentalists are always talking about it. But the right loathes it. In fact, the Bush administration is openly hostile to the European Union’s attempts to apply the precautionary principle in health and environmental regulations. In May 2003, shortly after the United States had invaded Iraq on better-safe-than-sorry grounds, John Graham, the White House’s top official in charge of vetting regulations, told the New York Times that the Bush administration considers the precautionary principle “to be a mythical concept, perhaps like a unicorn.” At the same time, the left—especially the left in Europe—scoffed when George W. Bush argued in favor of invading Iraq on the grounds that “if we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.” The left demanded stronger evidence that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, doubted claims that Hussein was linked to al-Qaeda, insisted there were less drastic measures that would achieve the same goal, and argued that the risk of not invading had to be carefully weighed against the risks that would be created by an invasion—exactly the same sort of arguments the Bush administration and other conservatives level when environmentalists or Europeans cite the precautionary principle as grounds for, say, banning chemicals or taking action on climate change. How selective people can be about “precaution” has never been so starkly illustrated as in the months leading up to the Iraq War.
The Bush administration’s appeals carried the day. Support approached 75 percent in the days before the tanks rolled. Saddam Hussein was so successfully connected to 9/11 in the public mind that a New York Times poll taken in September 2006—long after the administration had officially admitted Hussein had nothing to do with the attacks—found that one-third of Americans still thought the Iraqi dictator had been “personally involved.” The connection between terrorism and “weapons of mass destruction” was even tighter. In a 2004 Hart-Teeter poll that asked Americans to name the two types of terrorism that worried them the most, 48 percent cited bio-terrorism, 37 percent chemical weapons, and 23 percent nuclear weapons. Only 13 percent of respondents said airplane hijackings were one of the two most worrying forms of terrorism—even though that’s how the whole crisis started. A 2006 Gallup poll found almost half of Americans said it is likely that within the next five years terrorists will “set off a bomb that contains nuclear or biological material.”
As for the linkage of Iraq with the broader “war on terrorism,” that, too, was accomplished. The percentage of Americans who told Gallup they were very or somewhat worried that they or their families would be victims of terrorism shot up from 35 percent in April 2002 to 48 percent by February 2003. Iraq is the “central front in the War on Terror,” the president liked to say, and when victory on that front came swiftly, fear of terrorism at home fell. By July 2003, it hit a new low of 30 percent. But as the situation in Iraq slowly swung from euphoria to despair—and images of destruction and carnage once again filled evening news broadcasts—fear of terrorism slowly inched back up, reaching 45 percent in August 2006.
In 1933, it was in Franklin Roosevelt’s political interest to tell Americans the greatest danger was “fear itself.” Seventy years later, it was in George W. Bush’s political interest to do the opposite: The White House got the support it needed for invading Iraq by stoking public fears of terrorism and connecting those fears to Iraq.
And Iraq was far from the only benefit the administration reaped. Until 9/11, George W. Bush was a weak leader with a flimsy mandate—he had lost the popular vote, after all—and mediocre approval ratings. Afterward, he was a hero. Any president would have seen his support soar in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, but by casting the terrorist threat as a world war of uncertain duration, the president was transformed into a defiant Churchill, and this image, instead of fading with the autumn, would last as long as the war itself—which is to say, it was permanent. “The nation is at war,” the president liked to say, and the most tangible reminder of this was the periodic announcement of new terror alerts. Perhaps not surprisingly, a statistical analysis by Robb Willer, a graduate student at Cornell University, found a “consistent, positive relationship” between new terror alerts and the president’s approval rating. In another 2004 paper, a team of nine psychologists reported on experiments that showed that reminders of death or 9/11 increased support for the president.
Political operatives didn’t need psychologists to tell them that. Even long after the Iraq venture turned sour, Bush earned his highest ratings on his handling of terrorism. The same is true of Republicans in general. When danger looms, Americans want a strong figure in charge and so Republicans worked hard to make sure Americans sensed danger looming. In the 2002 congressional elections, even moderate Republicans played almost exclusively to the theme of terrorism, war, danger, and security while the Democrats focused on the weak economy and domestic issues. The Democrats were crushed.
The Republicans followed the same template in 2004 and 2006. If there was any change, it was only to make the message even blunter and scarier. In the campaign of 2006, Vice President Dick Cheney repeatedly warned of “mass death in the United States.” One Republican television ad used the primal imagery of hungry wolves gathering in a dark forest. Another featured the sound of ticking along with real quotations from an al-Qaeda leader—“we purchased some suitcase bombs” and 9/11 was “nothing compared to what you will see next”—followed by what looks like a close-up of a nuclear fireball. An ad from the pro-Republican “Progress for America” showed images of huge crowds chanting “Death to America!” while the narrator intoned, “These people want to kill us.” The point of this marketing was to collect votes, not dollars, but the basic technique is no different than that of corporations selling home alarms or cholesterol pills: Scare people, then offer to protect them.