What does the public thnk about the Iraq War?

Ruy Teixeira discusses the results of several polls on Iraq and the Bush administration. The result is a bleak view for the Bush Presidency.

A (Newsweek) Poll reports Bush's handling of Iraq at exactly 30 percent. There is no reason to think this rating will not get lower.

The latest Gallup poll reports that of 491 respondents, 54 percent agree that "In view of the developments since we first sent our troops to Iraq, do you think the United States made a mistake in sending troops to Iraq, or not?" Since August this response has averaged 53.7 with extremes at 49 and 59.

The same poll offered these choices:

• withdraw immediately (19%)
• withdraw in 12 months (33%)
• withdraw, take as many years as necessary (38%)
• send more troops. (7%)
• no opinion (3%)

That's 52 percent who want to withdraw immediately or in 12 months.

Teixeira also reports what John Mueller said in his article “The Iraq Syndrome” in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs.

The most striking thing about the comparison among the three wars [Korea, Vietnam and Iraq] is how much more quickly support has eroded in the case of Iraq. By early 2005, when combat deaths were around 1,500, the percentage of respondents who considered the Iraq war a mistake -- over half -- was about the same as the percentage who considered the war in Vietnam a mistake at the time of the 1968 Tet offensive, when nearly 20,000 soldiers had already died.

This lower tolerance for casualties is largely due to the fact that the American public places far less value on the stakes in Iraq than it did on those in Korea and Vietnam. The main threats Iraq was thought to present to the United States when troops went in -- weapons of mass destruction and support for international terrorism -- have been, to say the least, discounted. With those justifications gone, the Iraq war is left as something of a humanitarian venture, and, as Francis Fukuyama has put it, a request to spend "several hundred billion dollars and several thousand American lives in order to bring democracy to ... Iraq" would "have been laughed out of court."....

Growing opposition to the war effort....has little to do with whether or not there is an active antiwar movement at home. There has not been much of one in the case of the Iraq war, nor was there one during the war in Korea. Nonetheless, support for those ventures eroded as it did during the Vietnam War, when antiwar protest was frequent and visible.....

Moreover, support for the war declines whether or not war opponents are able to come up with specific policy alternatives. Dwight Eisenhower never seemed to have much of a plan for getting out of the Korean War -- although he did say that, if elected, he would visit the place -- but discontent with the war still worked well for him in the 1952 election; Richard Nixon's proposals for fixing the Vietnam mess were distinctly unspecific, although he did from time to time mutter that he had a "secret plan." Wars hurt the war-initiating political party not because the opposition comes up with a coherent clashing vision -- George McGovern tried that, with little success, against Nixon in 1972 -- but because discontent over the war translates into vague distrust of the capacities of the people running the country.

So support for the Iraq War as it is currently being fought has stabalized at "Not worth it, time to figure a way out within a year." and history suggests that the opponents during an expenisive overseas war do not have to propose a plan to get the advantage of such popular dislike for the war. Unless I am wrong, I seem to recall that the Republicans took the House in 1952.