Most Americans untouched by war

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Since the start of the Iraq war four years ago, Americans have bought more than 110 million cellphones and spent $35 billion on HDTV sets.

They have moved into 5 million new homes, bought about 60 million new cars and trucks and watched the Dow Jones industrial average climb from 8,200 to 12,000 and beyond.

Despite bloodshed from a conflict lasting longer than U.S. participation in World War II, life for most Americans has clicked along without personal loss or even higher federal taxes to cover the fighting in Iraq.

"We're in a country where it isn't clear in our daily routine that we're living with war," said Carolyn Marvin, a communications professor and cultural historian at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication.

In January, President Bush acknowledged "it's a totally different kind of war than ones we're used to," but he dismissed an interviewer's suggestion that people outside the volunteer military haven't sacrificed enough.

"One thing we want during this war on terror is for people to feel like their life's moving on," Bush said, "that they're able to make a living and send their kids to college and put more money on the table."

Some experts say a public "disconnect" from the Iraq mission makes it more difficult for the president to rally support for completing it. "People need to feel they have a personal stake in its success," Marvin said.

Others argue that a lack of sacrifice on the part of average Americans -- who have enjoyed federal tax cuts while more than $500 billion in war spending fattens the national debt -- has allowed the war to continue as long as it has.

"We're anesthetized to the cost of this war because so much of the funding is being put on our national credit card," said Bob Bixby of the Concord Coalition, which advocates balancing the budget. "Without that sense of immediate sacrifice ... it's easy for Americans to feel this war is happening on their TVs but not really in their living rooms."

Surveys by the Pew Center for the People and the Press show a slow slipping in Americans' interest in news from Iraq.

Two months after the March 2003 invasion, 63 percent of Americans reported they were "closely following" events there. That figure fell to 47 percent in 2004 and 37 percent last summer. In 2006, almost twice as many Americans were closely following gasoline prices than were glued to news from Iraq, Pew's "News Interest Index" showed.

Further polling last year suggested "almost three-quarters of Americans feel either less emotionally involved in the war or no more emotionally involved than they've felt in the past," Pew managing editor Carroll Doherty said.

Maybe as a result, "we're getting a muddled message from the public on what should be done from here," he said. "Most Americans say they want our troops out. But how, when and under what circumstances? There's no consensus."

On March 19, 2003, many Americans were seated in movie theaters showing the musical "Chicago" when the first U.S. missiles hit Baghdad.

Bob Hope, Katharine Hepburn and Johnny Cash were still alive. Average interest on a 30-year mortgage had fallen to a "record-low" 5.61 percent -- on its way to dropping even more.

At the University of Kansas, Jonathan Ng was student-body president -- one of several people interviewed about the coming war that week by The Kansas City Star. He expects to graduate this spring with a law degree from the University of Notre Dame, and he knows one person, a University of Kansas fraternity brother, who has served in Iraq.

"I've two competing thoughts that I don't quite know how to reconcile," Ng said this month from New Orleans, where he and fellow law students met hurricane victims as part of a seminar sponsored by the Center for Social Concerns.

"One, it's kind of ironic that we're sending all our resources to Iraq when we've got disaster here in our own backyard," he said. "At the same time, I think we need to be focusing on what needs to be done to stabilize Iraq. ... We don't want to let this become a cause that was waged in vain."

Ng on the eve of war told the newspaper that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony to the United Nations convinced him that Iraq probably was an imminent threat to the United States.

"Like most Americans, I'm not pleased with the information that was given to us," said Ng, now 26. "But it's tough to keep dwelling on the past and the reasons we went there. We need to move forward."

During World War II, rationing of food, cars and fuel -- and the fact that 82 percent of U.S. males between ages 20 and 25 were serving -- helped steel the home front to the struggle. However, public support for the Vietnam War went south as draftees died in action and TV brought images of combat and suffering into American homes.

According to a recent poll by Zogby International, 45 percent of Americans say they know a family directly affected by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Those respondents who said they knew a family were only slightly more likely to support the Iraq mission and Bush's recent infusion of troops than was the general public.