Texans turn against Bush's war
Disillusionment with Iraq is smoldering even in the heart of Bush country, where military families have paid a heavy price.
By Bill Sasser
Read more: George W. Bush, Texas, Military, Politics, Afghanistan, News, Iraq
Sept. 20, 2007 | LUCKENBACH, Texas -- As George W. Bush approaches his final year in office saddled with an unpopular war, the shifting winds of public opinion have reached even the wide open spaces of Bush country. More and more Texans appear disillusioned with the war in Iraq and with the man who was once their widely popular governor, though some can still seem reluctant to talk about it.
"The truth is, folks in Texas are hurting," says Big Bo Kern, standing behind the counter at the Luckenbach General Store, a fixture of this small but well-known Texas crossroads. "They probably won't tell you that, because we supported Bush and stood up for him. Back in the day you couldn't swing a dead cat around here without hitting one of those 'W' stickers. But feelings around here started to change about a year ago, when guys started going back to Iraq for their third deployment."
The town of Luckenbach, founded in 1849 and made famous a generation ago by the hit song from "Waylon and Willie," still hosts live cowboy bands on weekends and can seem timeless. But over the past couple of years, autographed photos of Willie Nelson and Jerry Jeff Walker tacked to the walls of the general store have been joined by snapshots of young servicemen in Iraq, holding up their Luckenbach T-shirts. "We get young guys coming through here, on leave or on their way back to Fort Hood for their next deployment, so I give them a hat or a T-shirt and ask them to send me a photo back," says Kern, 45, an Army veteran originally from the nearby town of Sisterdale. "We also get soldiers from Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. The hospital takes them out on trips sometimes. They come in and most of them are horribly burned, some missing arms or legs. I give them a T-shirt or a hat," Kern says. "It breaks your heart to see them."
Texas has paid a price for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. More Texans than people from any other state have served in those wars. From September 2001 through July 2007, 171,335 active-duty service members and 23,906 National Guard troops and reservists from Texas have been deployed with Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom, according to data provided to Salon by the Department of Defense. (The numbers account for every tour of duty served by every soldier.) As of July 31, Texans represented 35,015 active-duty service members and 2,649 Reserve troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, accounting for more than 14 percent of total forces stationed in those countries. (Approximately 264,000 Americans were stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan as of July 31, according to the Defense Department figures.) As of Sept. 17, 378 Texans have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and more than 2,200 wounded. Only California has seen a greater total number of deaths, with 447 service members killed.
Many Texans have deployed from Fort Hood, the Army's largest base with more than 44,000 personnel. Sprawling across hundreds of square miles of Texas Hill Country between Austin and Waco, Fort Hood is home to the 1st Cavalry Division and the 4th Infantry Division, which have been in constant rotation to Iraq since the 2003 invasion. At a benefit concert in nearby Killeen on a recent Thursday night, Marissa Sousa, a 29-year-old Iraq war veteran, staffed a table for the advocacy group Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, offering brochures on veterans' health issues such as post-traumatic stress disorder.
"I see some of these guys and I know they're back from Iraq," says Sousa, who retired as a staff sergeant from a unit based at Fort Hood, and whose fiancé is currently stationed with the 1st Cavalry Division in Baghdad. "They start circling my table and I can see they want to talk to someone, but it's difficult to do. Morale is down. A lot of them are only going back again for their buddies, not for patriotism or their president. They're doing it because they have to, and because they would feel guilty about staying behind."
Speaking freely around Fort Hood about the war is difficult, Sousa says, because "Texans are very patriotic and very proud of their state. For a lot of people around here, Bush is like the president of Texas, and supporting the soldiers means supporting Bush."
But elsewhere in Texas Bush has become a figure that former supporters say they no longer recognize. "I was very enthusiastic for Bush when he first ran, embarrassingly so looking back now," says Paul Burka, executive editor of Texas Monthly magazine. A political independent who has covered Texas politics for 30 years, Burka twice voted for Bush for president. "Early on his approval rating in Texas was around 80 percent, and he did well with Democrats as well as Republicans and independents. Now there's widespread disappointment he hasn't led the country in the same way he led Texas. To a lot of us he doesn't look like the same person he was as governor. I would say it's been an enormous disappointment."
Burka's sentiments bring to mind a public renunciation in Austin last April by Matthew Dowd, a Texas native and once a Democratic pollster who helped Bush win both presidential elections. After leaving Washington, Dowd, in an interview with the New York Times, was critical of Bush's leadership and called for a withdrawal from Iraq.
Iraq is the No. 1 issue on the minds of Texans, according to a recent Lyceum poll sponsored by the University of Texas. (The poll asked open-ended questions about statewide issues of concern, but did not track positive or negative opinion on the war.) Yet, a poll in July by Survey USA found that Bush's approval rating in his home state stood at 41 percent, with 57 percent disapproving, significantly better than Bush's national numbers. (A national poll by Newsweek in July, for example, found Bush's approval rating at 26 percent, with 65 percent disapproving.)
Indeed, it can be difficult to pinpoint where people's feelings about the war, and the president, collide and diverge. "Support for Bush was always less about his stated political beliefs than the idea that he was their guy, a native son," says James Henson, a University of Texas public policy professor who helped direct the Lyceum poll. "I used to ask Democrats who voted for him why, and they'd say, 'He's from Texas.' There's a strong sense of cultural identity here -- a cliché about Texas that has a lot of truth to it. But finding people now who say they voted for Bush, at least in Austin, is like trying to find people who voted for Nixon in his 1972 landslide a few years after the fact," Henson says. "No one wants to talk about it," he adds. "The criticism here is much more muted than in the rest of the country."
