Polls and the Iraq War

This web page provides a handy-dandy list of a whole slew of polls concerning the Iraq War. This particular blogger, oldstyleliberal, finds they seem to show a lot of disaffection with the war, yet the disaffection does not translate into a prospective rout of John McCain by Barack Obama in the fall election.

John McCain is well-known to support the war, seeing it as part and parcel of the fight for our country's life in the global war on terrorism. Barack Obama, meanwhile, has opposed the war from day one on grounds that it was "dumb" for the U.S. to start it. Their attitudes could not be further apart and still be considered by any stretch of the imagination reasonable. So one might think Obama's antiwar stance, in that it matches that of the bulk of the electorate, would make him odds-on favorite in November.

But, no. Obama may be very narrowly ahead of McCain right now — see Poll Finds Independent Voters Split Between McCain, Obama, with actual Washington Post-ABC News polling data here — but it is not clear that the war dominates the decision-making process voters are going through in lining up behind one candidate or the other in 2008. This is itself odd, I think, since questions of war and peace have historically played big roles in how we elect presidents. (Or am I wrong about that?)

At any rate, it looks as if roughly two-thirds of us continue to feel that President Bush is not handling the war well, and a clear majority feel it is not still possible to achieve victory in Iraq. A slight majority used to want us to bring the troops home in 2009 without waiting for Iraq to stabilize, but in more recent polling that percentage drops to 49 percent, possibly in response to the lower rate of American deaths of late and the consequent increase in hope that Iraq can be stabilized.

Even so, 61 percent in a May 30-June 3, 2008, CBS News poll say Iraq will probably never have a stable democracy.

Blunting the effect of pro/anti war sentiment on the prospective general election outcome is the fact that the roughly two in three Americans who are disenchanted with the war split down the middle on whether all of the troops, or just some, ought to be withdrawn immediately. Clearly, there must be quite a few of us who cannot imagine that leaving the troops in Iraq will ever bring stability, but do not want all the troops taken out of Iraq now.

That seeming contradiction probably reflects a widespread unwillingness to have us look like failures in the eyes of the world, plus a practical appreciation of the fact that a hasty departure would expose our troops to more risk, not less, during any sped up, hence chaotic withdrawal period.

Meanwhile, Democrats are nearly unanimous in opposing the war, while Republicans and Independents break about 2-to-1 in the war's favor. However, though Republicans and Independents support the war in roughly equal numbers, the former are much less willing to have the next president wind the war down than are the latter.

About a third of Americans say the country is safer from terrorist attack due to the war in Iraq than it otherwise would have been, and the number who think deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks on us has only very recently begun to decline from roughly that same level to, presently, something more than a quarter of the populace.

It is clear that continuing support for the war depends greatly on the many among us who in their minds connect the war's onset directly to the terrorist attacks on American soil on 9/11. Given that skeptics spared no effort in debunking the Saddam's-links-to-terrorism myth during the early days of the war, it looks as if over a quarter of Americans have simply made up their minds that such "liberal" carping should not be listened to.