Even Mormons Jumping Off Bush Bandwagon as War Takes its Toll - International Social/Political

Other than his own greedy family members, oil barons and military contractors, no group of Americans has stood so steadfastly behind the Bush administration than the members of the Church of Latter-day Saints.

Voters in Utah, the Mormon theocracy, have supported Bush with loyalty they usually reserve for the Brigham Young football team. In 2004, Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney's criminal enterprise got 71 percent of the vote in Utah.

The Salt Lake Tribune reported that a two-year compilation of Gallup polls showed staunch support among Mormons for the war in Iraq and Bush's handling of the violence: "American Mormons, more than any other religious group over that period, believed the United States was right to invade Iraq."

But a recent survey found "just 44 percent of those identifying themselves as Mormons said they backed Bush's war management." Mormon support for the war has plunged 21 percentage points in just five months.

The defection of the Mormons is a seismic political event, and you can bet Bush's political brain, Karl Rove, turns pale when he sees those numbers. The head of the Church of Latter-day Saints is expressing doubts about war, and the mayor of Salt Lake City is leading the charge to impeach Bush.

LDS President Gordon B. Hinckley may have set the stage for the precipitous plunge in Mormon support for the war. Speaking to students at Brigham Young University last fall, Hinckley spoke of "the terrible cost of war."

While not mentioning Iraq or Bush directly, the church leader said of war, "What a fruitless thing it often is," adding, "And what a terrible price it extracts." In the Mormon tradition, the words of the church president are carefully weighed.

Kirk Jowers, the director of the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute of Politics, told the Salt Lake Tribune the church leader's remarks "may have been interpreted by the LDS community as an indictment against the world's violence."

Jowers said, "Small phrases by President Hinckley are to the LDS community as Alan Greenspan's words were to the financial community."

Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, a lapsed Mormon, rejected subtle pronouncements and ambiguity. He said Bush should be impeached for committing "high crimes and misdemeanors." Anderson had the guts to say what every clear-thinking American ought to be shouting from the mountain tops.

Anderson told CNN, "If impeachment were ever justified, this is certainly the time. This president, by engaging in such incredible abuses of power, breaches of trust with both the Congress and the American people, and misleading us into this tragic and unbelievable war, the violation of treaties, other international law, our Constitution, our own domestic laws and then his role in heinous human rights abuse; I think all of that together calls for impeachment."

Whatever Democratic candidate for president will say and embrace similar words of truth has my support. That sure as hell will not be the calculating, triangulating Hillary Clinton. Such crisp honesty escapes her. Other leaders in the Democratic Party are similarity afflicted with the play-it-safe syndrome.

Anderson made his fellow Democrats cringe, saying forthrightly, "The fact that anybody would say that impeachment is off the table when we have a president who has been so egregious in his violation of our Constitution, a president who asserts unitary executive power, that is absolutely chilling."

Anderson denounced the "culture of obedience" that has so damaged our nation and weakened the Democratic Party.

Bush will now blame Congress, the Democrats and the Iraqi people for the disaster in Iraq that was doomed from its inception. Those of us who rejected the "culture of obedience" are seeing the horrible tragedy we predicted unfolding every day.

Bush's surge is just another slogan. There is no military solution that will undo the fiasco the invasion and occupation have brought.

Bush only wants to keep the war going long enough to pass the bloody baton to his successor. Then he will fade into ignominious oblivion, hiding out at his ranch in Texas, even more disconnected from the suffering his messianic megalomania and unrivaled incompetence have brought the world.

Last week, 152 people were killed when a truck bomb exploded in Tal Afar, making it the single deadliest bombing attack since the war began. Bush claimed last March that Tal Afar was a great Iraq success story. If Americans knew more about these stories, the White House argued at the time, they would have more confidence in Bush's victory strategy.

On March 23, 2006, Bush told a crowd of supporters in Cleveland he had found the magic bullet in Tal Afar, driving terrorists from what he hailed as a "free city."

Bush gushed about his success in the northern Iraq city, bellowing to the faithful, "The strategy that worked so well in Tal Afar did not emerge overnight -- it came only after much trial and error. It took time to understand and adjust to the brutality of the enemy in Iraq, yet the strategy is working."

The reality in Tal Afar destroys "Bubble Boy" Bush's grand delusions. In revenge attacks, Shiite police rounded up 70 people in a Sunni neighborhood and summarily executed them. Can Bush and his strategists explain for us what brutal enemies are responsible for this bloodshed?

Last week, more than 500 people were killed. The death toll will continue as long as American troops remain in Iraq. Only political reconciliation can salvage the nation, and Iraqis must determine their own destiny. The arrogance and cruelty of western occupation will never bring peace and stability to Iraq.

The extent of the civilian casualties in Iraq will make us despised in the Middle East for decades to come. Bush's war gives the bin Ladens of the world just what they want.

The British, our only significant ally in Iraq, are now confirming that the scientists who concluded more than 600,000 Iraqis have been killed since the invasion were spot-on.

The study done by researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the Al Mustansiriyia University in Baghdad was originally published last October in the British medical journal "The Lancet."

At the time, the U.S. and British governments rejected the death-toll survey. Bush dismissed the report as "unreliable," while failing to offer a scintilla of evidence to support his claim. The toadies in the corporate media let him get away with it.

The chief scientific adviser to the British Ministry of Defense, Roy Anderson, reviewed the methodology used in calculating the Iraq death toll. He told the Independent newspaper the methods were "robust" and "close to best practice." Another official told the paper it was "a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones."

Now that our aggression has shattered Iraq, Bush and his neocon Amen Chorus are now blaming the Iraqis for their fate. They just don't appreciate what we've done for them. Sure, there have been a few casualties, but that's the price of freedom, these condescending cowards are saying. We gave them a chance, and those ignorant, unruly desert people are rejecting our gifts.

The other promised benefits from Operation Iraqi Liberation -- OIL -- are just not materializing. A Saddamless Iraq was sure to stabilize and democratize the Middle East, and make Israel safe and secure. Our "moderate" Arab friends would join in our crusade, and peace would spread like wildfire. But somehow Bush's hubris has collided with reality, and his geopolitical fantasies are manifest failures.

Even Bush's hand-holding buddy Saudi King Abdullah has abandoned him. The king cancelled his appearance at a White House dinner planned to honor him next month. This extraordinary diplomatic insult is a measure of the Saudis' anger and the strain on their long friendship with the United States.

The Busheviks have rejected everything the Saudis have tried to do to broker a deal to jump-start talks with the Palestinian government, settle tensions in Lebanon and bring Iran into regional discussions.

King Abdullah now calls the U.S forces in Iraq "an illegal foreign occupation." The Saudis are skeptical of any hope for peace in the region. Like the Mormons, they are bailing out on Bush's war.

Hinckley, the prophet and seer for millions of Mormons around the world, spoke about how fleeting the power of military and political leaders can be in his remarks at Brigham Young.

"They ruled with near omnipotence, and their very words brought terror into the hearts of people," he said. And yet, he added, "they have all passed into the darkness of the grave."

Bush's war in Iraq is lost. Nothing can be done to recover from it. The war and the people who created it have descended into the darkness of the grave.

Bill Gallagher, a Peabody Award winner, is a former Niagara Falls city councilman who now covers Detroit for Fox2 News.

©2007 The Niagara Falls Reporter

Last Updated:03/25/2007 10:16:01 AM MDT

As a group, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have been staunch supporters of President Bush and his management of Iraq since the war began four years ago.

So Jeffrey Jones wasn't surprised to see that a two-year compilation of Gallup polls showed American Mormons, more than any other religious group over that period, believed the United States was right to invade Iraq.

"It seemed to make sense," said Jones, a political analyst with Gallup, a New Jersey-based national polling firm. "Mormons are overwhelmingly Republican, and party affiliation is a powerful predictor of people's view on the war."

But that steady tide may be turning, even in the heart of Zion. A January poll by The Salt Lake Tribune showed a precipitous drop in support for Bush's handling of the war among Utah's Latter-day Saints.

In the survey, just 44 percent of those identifying themselves as Mormon said they backed Bush's war management. That's a level considerably higher than Bush gets from Utah's non-Mormon population and the nation at large, but it's also a 21 percentage point drop from just five months earlier. The poll's margin of error was plus or minus 4.7 percentage points.

Such abrupt moves in group opinion are uncommon. Pollsters say numbers generally move gradually, unless "spooked" by something. But what?

LDS Church spokesman Mark Tuttle insisted there has been "no additional statement, clarification, changed policy or announcement that can account for" the rapid change in Utah church members' perceptions of the war. And he reiterated that the church has no official position on Iraq.

But that doesn't mean prominent Mormons didn't have plenty of influence on how members were thinking about war and peace between August and January. Rather than one unmistakable message from the church, the change may have been ushered by a rapid series of more subtle signals that it was indeed acceptable for Mormons to question their president during wartime.

And it all may have started at the very top.

Spooked on Halloween

Speaking to Brigham Young University students on Oct. 31, LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley lamented "the terrible cost of war...What a fruitless thing it so often is," he said. "And what a terrible price it exacts."

Hinckley recalled standing at the graves of some of history's most powerful military and political leaders. "In their time they commanded armies," he said. "They ruled with near omnipotence, and their very words brought terror into the hearts of people," he said. And yet, he noted, all of them were now dead: "They have all passed into the darkness of the grave."

Though brooding heavily on the consequences of war in general, Hinckley never mentioned Iraq or President Bush specifically. But in the following days, online message boards and e-mail discussion groups lit up with conversation about what Hinckley - "prophet, seer and revelator" to millions of Mormons worldwide - might have meant in regard to the nation's current wars.

"He may or may not have intended anything by it, and he certainly didn't mention Iraq in that speech, but the speech certainly may have been interpreted by the LDS community as an indictment against the world's violence," said Kirk Jowers, director of the University of Utah's Hinckley Institute of Politics. "Small phrases by President Hinckley are to the LDS community as Alan Greenspan's words were to the financial community."

While ambiguous in relation to Iraq, Hinckley's words wouldn't be the final indication that Bush's war leadership was rightfully subject to question among the LDS faithful.

There would be other, clearer messages to come.

Pessimism from politicos

The month after Hinckley's speech, Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. - one of the more prominent politicians who are LDS members - returned from Iraq with an unfavorable report about the chaos he saw in the war-torn nation's capital city. "The security situation is Baghdad is out of hand," said Huntsman, who enjoys wide popularity among Utahns. "I am less optimistic about a successful outcome."

Huntsman's dismay echoed that of other well-known Mormon politicians from both sides of the aisle - Sens. Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, and Republican Gordon Smith of Oregon - who were also issuing disappointing proclamations about what the Bush administration had hitherto referred to as Iraq's "progress."

November and December brought on crushing congressional defeats for Republican legislators, the resignation of war architect and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and a damning report on the war's progress by the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel commissioned to come up with solutions to increasing violence and a burgeoning civil war.
"That was an independent assessment of the circumstances" in Iraq, Rep. Jim Matheson said.

The Utah Democrat, who like all of Utah's congressional delegation is a member of the LDS Church, said he believes fellow Mormons respond rationally when confronted with such evidence. That's an opinion shared by blogger Guy Murray, author of Messenger and Advocate - http://messengerandadvocate.wordpress.com - a popular blog about Mormon issues. "It's true that, in general, LDS members are more conservative as a whole, but at one point the whole country backed this war and this president," said Murray. "Over the years, the country has soured on this war, and Mormons may be just following the national trend."

Murray said he believes that, as the war has lumbered violently on, it has become less socially perilous for Mormons to express "alternative" opinions about Iraq. Especially, he noted, as "the church has gone out of its way to stress political neutrality." "I think there is an element of comfort in that," he said.

On both sides

Though The Tribune's January poll showed Bush had lost the backing of many of Utah's Latter-day Saints - bringing the "reddest state in the nation" below the mark for majority support - it also showed a nearly even split among Mormons themselves, with 44 percent expressing support and 41 percent asserting disapproval of the president's war handling.

Even among members of tight-knit LDS families there is disagreement about how faith should inform a Saint's political views. "Do I still support the war? Yes," said Peter Sorensen, an insurance agent in Salt Lake City and a Mormon. "I have always felt from a religious standpoint that fighting against evil and looking out for the well-being of our earthly brothers and sisters was reason enough for going into Iraq." Sorensen's cousin, fellow Mormon and lifelong friend Joe Marshall sees things differently. "My faith is unwavering," Marshall said. "Christ advocated unconditional peace, and he expects it from his disciples. . . . I ache to see so many fellow lovers of Jesus casually letting their political agendas come before these principles, espousing this unjust act of violence, rather than despising it."

In their family, as in Utah, the issue remains open for debate - perhaps now more than ever.

© Copyright 2007, The Salt Lake Tribune

BYU protests Cheney
by Debbie Hummel via rialator - Casper Star-Tribune Tuesday, Apr 3 2007, 11:43pm

Some at BYU urge withdrawal of Cheney's commencement invitation

PROVO, Utah -- Some students and faculty on one of the nation's most conservative campuses want Brigham Young University to withdraw an invitation for Vice President Dick Cheney to speak at commencement later this month.

Critics at the school question whether Cheney sets a good example for graduates, citing his promotion of faulty intelligence before the Iraq war and his role in the CIA leak scandal.

The private university, which is owned by the Mormon church, has "a heavy emphasis on personal honesty and integrity in all we do," said Warner Woodworth, a professor at BYU's business school.

"Cheney just doesn't measure up," he said.

Woodworth is helping organize an online petition asking that the school rescind its invitation to the vice president. In its first week, the petition collected more than 2,300 signatures, mostly from people describing themselves as students, alumni or members of the church.

The display of dissent is rare for a university that has been voted the nation's most "stone-cold sober" school nine years in a row in the annual Princeton Review of party schools.

Students at BYU adhere to a strict honor code that forbids everything from drinking coffee to wearing shorts or short skirts. The school's 30,000 students seldom even stray from campus sidewalks, leaving its lawns pristine.

"Cougars don't cut corners," is how one saying describes students, most of whom belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

But student Diane Bailey, who is leading a protest Wednesday against Cheney's visit, said students are not "robotic conservatives."

Bailey and others are upset by Cheney's role in promoting faulty intelligence that led the U.S. into the Iraq war. They also cite his proximity to the CIA leak scandal in which his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice.

Cheney's BYU speech is the first of two commencement addresses he is scheduled to give this spring. The other will be May 26 at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Both are institutions where Cheney could have expected to receive a warm reception, Woodworth said.

Utah has consistently supported the administration, delivering President Bush his largest margin of victory in any state in 2000 and 2004. In Utah County, home to BYU, about 85 percent of voters chose the Bush-Cheney ticket in 2004.

Richard Davis, a political-science professor and adviser for the college Democrats, said the uproar over Cheney's visit is evidence of a rift within the school and church that belies the faith's larger claim of being politically neutral.

"He should be invited to come. He should speak. But let's not send the signal that we're abandoning our political neutrality," Davis said. "There is no political gospel in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."

The church has a policy of political neutrality and issues an annual statement declaring that both major political parties include ideals that Mormons could embrace.

"It's one thing to invite some milquetoast Republican. But Dick Cheney?" Davis said. The protest reflects lack of support for Cheney, as well as "the larger issue of diversity and more liberal people within the BYU community and within the LDS church."

Historically dissent has not been well received at the school. Last year, a BYU professor wrote a newspaper opinion piece opposing the church's call for a constitutional ban on gay marriage. In response, the school announced it would not renew Jeffrey Nielsen's contract.

Cheney's office said his commencement speech would not have a political theme.

The school approved a permit for the college Democrats' Wednesday protest and is working on finding a protest site for the day of Cheney's speech.

"We recognize that members of our campus community are entitled to their opinions," said university spokeswoman Carri Jenkins. "Political neutrality does not mean there cannot be any political discussion."

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