The troops aren’t happy

February 28, 2006

Just to follow up on the reference to Nick Kristoff’s column from earlier, Zogby conducted a poll of troops serving in Iraq and found a surprisingly small number who share the president’s view of the war.

An overwhelming majority of 72% of American troops serving in Iraq think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year, and nearly one in four say the troops should leave immediately, a new Le Moyne College/Zogby International survey shows.

The poll, conducted in conjunction with Le Moyne College’s Center for Peace and Global Studies, showed that 29% of the respondents, serving in various branches of the armed forces, said the U.S. should leave Iraq “immediately,” while another 22% said they should leave in the next six months. Another 21% said troops should be out between six and 12 months, while 23% said they should stay “as long as they are needed.”

Oddly, one of the Bush gang’s favorite arguments is that troop morale is dependent on “staying the course.” The men and women in uniform don’t seem to agree.

Indeed, many troops don’t seem to buy into the White House talking points at all. A total of 42% said the mission in Iraq is unclear, and there seems to be widespread confusion about why the troops are still there — with those polled divided between removing WMD, toppling Saddam, establishing a model democracy, securing oil supplies, and provide long-term U.S. bases for the region.

Politically, polls like this one make it harder for Bush and his allies to denounce critics of the war. When the president’s rivals are saying the same thing the troops are saying, Rove & Co. can’t very well Swiftboat everyone. (Well, maybe they’ll try, but it’s hardly an effective strategy.)

The troops aren’t the only unhappy ones with Bush. World wide popularity is plummeting too.
I couldn’t pass this up with it’s rich imagery…

About 1,000 Muslims demonstrated in Bombay, some waving placards reading “Devil Bush Go Back,” with caricatures of Bush as a cross between Superman and Satan — dressed in the superhero’s red-and-blue costume with devil’s horns and clutching a missile.

  • when bush says we need to stay the course and complete the mission in order to honor the sacrifice of those who have fallen, i always wonder, how many soldiers must die to honor the death of another? is it a one-to-one ration, the soldier who dies today honoring the one who died yesterday and the one who will die tomorrow honoring the one who dies today? what if two soldiers die together; are they honoring each other? does their shared fate create a greater need for honoring?

    is the honoring based on rank? must five privates die to honor a colonel, and can a colonel honor five privates? how are national guardsmen factored in? are they worth 3/5 of a soldier? how much is an iraqi civilian worth in this calculas, 1/20? how much is the loss of a limb or sense worth?

    with 2300 dead, how many of these remain to be honored, and how many more must die to do? of course, then more will have to honor them.

  • Now that Rove&Co have lost the support of the troops, they’ll turn on the troops: ingrates given college educations and thousands of dollars of signup incentives are behaving the way their less favored predecessors behaved – happy soliders always complain about their duty. Etc., etc.

  • Did anyone ask them why they think we are STILL there, as opposed to why we were there in the first place?

    Here is the real stunner : ” 85% said the U.S. mission is mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks,” 77% said they also believe the main or a major reason for the war was “to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq.”

    Only small percentages see the mission there as securing oil supplies (11%) or to provide long-term bases for US troops in the region (6%).

    So basically the troops are completely clueless as to the true nature of why we are in Iraq, and the reasons they think we are there basically lead them to believe that we shouldnt be there much longer. Perhaps telling them the real reasons would actually garner MORE of their support and boost morale, because the fact is, we ARE there to secure oil supplies – this has been an acknowledged geopolitical justification for being in the Middle East by even Dick Cheney himself when he was in prior administrations and it remains so today. Let me see if I can dig up that quote…

  • What bothers me is this…”While 85% said the U.S. mission is mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks,”

    I can’t believe the troops over there have bought into that. If accurate, they truly are fighting for a lie.

  • angry young man, this is again the Administration’s failure to understand basic finance – as in any investment, what you have already put in our sunk costs, even if those costs are in human lives. You are supposed to zero out whatever the past is, and look at the calculus going forward, that is, if we pursue a strategy now, are more lives lost worth what we are going to get out of it? Noone seems to be willing to make that sort of calculation as long as we must honor the dead in the way described in your note.

  • That also bothered me, about the 85% who thought their mission was to retaliate against Saddam Hussein for 9/11. There should have been a follow-up to that: Now that Saddam is in captivity, isn’t the mission accomplished and shouldn’t the troops be brought home?

    Uh, oh, I sense “mission creep.”

  • Be fair to the troops:

    Many have been there for so long, they were already over there when the REALITY BASED community started proving the Saddam/9-11 connection as complete bullshit.

    You don’t really believe they get the TRUTH from their commanders over there do you?!

    This is, in so many ways, the saddest part of the Iraq reality: our soldiers are going to come home, having lost friends and innocence in Iraq, only to find out that the reasons they went through so much weren’t real.

    Bush, as Commander-in-Cheif, has betrayed his troops.

    He is a traitor!

  • It’s dinned into their heads that they’re there to retaliate for 9/11, at least according to a couple of returned students of mine, one Army NG, one Regular Army.

    My feeling is that there’s enough residual distaste, among a lot of citizen-soldiers in the Guard at least, at America waging an unprovoked war of agression that only the strongest argument will overcome it, and that demands that 9/11 be pressed into service as justification.

  • Believe me, as an Army vet who was in Panama for most of 1989, you do go into a bubble where the only outside news you get is from Stars and Stripes and AFN. Every hour, they played Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” on the radio. I still can’t stand that song, not for its message, but because I got plain sick of it. For most of us, we took everything we heard with a boulder of salt, but I guess we didn’t have a traumatic and exploitible event like 9/11 back then.

  • I was working at AFN-J (then FEN) on the radio in Tokyo in 1990/91.
    If I ever hear Lee Greenwood again it will be too soon. And if I ever have the occasion to meet Mr. Greenwood, I will punch him in the throat.
    I must have played that damn song 10,000 times.

    Bastard.

  • Tell me if I get the math wrong but:

    It says “as many as” 1 in 4 which should tranlate to 25% 1/4=25/100
    In reality it is 29% which in my mind is signifigantly greater than the implied “as many as” It could well be just as close to 1 in 3 as it is 1 in 4

  • It says “nearly 1 in 4” say we should leave immediately. That means nearly 25%. The actual number is 29%, and could be higher, since 4% did not respond. 33.3% is 1 in 3 but even if the nonresponses were all of the “leave immediately” crowd, you still dont get to 1 in 3.

    Since it is not lower than 1 in 4, however, the wording is slightly misleading. When the convention “nearly” is used, it often means just less, or almost.. which is clearly the wrong side of the argument on this point. It shouldnt read “as many as” but rather “more than” 1 in 4, or “nearly 1 in 3”

  • Slightly tangential, asked what Washington would do if civil war broke out, Bush said in the ABC interview: “I don’t buy your premise that there’s going to be a civil war.” He then, of course, wouldn’t go there as the saying goes. This is horrible journalism. The follow up should be, I’m not saying it’s a premise, Mr. President, but a possible eventuality. Are you saying that civil war is impossible? Since Bush couldn’t say that it’s impossible, the followup then becomes, since it’s a possibility, what would the administration do? Perhaps they need a refresher course….

  • Homer, maybe we will get lucky one day, and one of those mental midgets will think up the same question AND the appropriate follow up. Looks like we are heading down that road whether he likes it or not though. I wonder who gets to officially declare its a civil war, the Iraqi “government” or our “government”.

  • What really gets me is that Rumsfeld wanted to CUT the number of ground troops in both the active and NG force (meaning more oversea deployments for those remaining), but increase spending for pie-in-sky weapons systems like National Missile Defense, F-22, Joint Strike Fighter, The Navy’s DDX destroyer, global strike weapon systems, and airborne lasers. AND the Army doesn’t want to buy better body armor for their troops because it costs twice as much as the Interceptor crap they’re issued. Troops are told if they bring privately-bought vests, they void their $400,000 SGLI insurance.
    But this administration supports the troops, you know.

  • The shifting rationales for this war make me dizzy; but the shifting rationales for this war make our troops sick.

  • With 72% opposition to staying in Iraq,, using the military backdrops of military folk for Bush’s speeches will become increasingly problematic… especially when talking about resolve to finish the job…..applause lines get lukewarm applause at best .
    So where CAN Bush find receptive aduiences for his speeches anymore?

    Hmmmmmm… The last refuge is someplace where the 99 percentile income bracket hangs out.

  • This information is deeply troubling.
    It is never good for the civilian leadership to be so out of step with
    the military. Bush’s failures are creating an increasingly dangerous
    situation. The more he tries to supress the gravity of the situation in
    Iraq the more difficult it will be to defuse the coming explosion of
    open resentment by the rank and file soldiers against their own
    commander in chief.
    We have always had as our “prime directive” (if you will) that the
    military always defers to the civilians. But with the colossal
    blunders witnessed in Bush’s Iraq policy this may no longer be true.
    Those soldiers aren’t going to stay in a protective information bubble
    forever. When they slowly and collectively realize how badly they
    have been used by this administration for its nefarious purposes
    they will turn on it with a vengeance. And when that happens
    are we still going to have democratic republic?
    Like Lee Greenwood sings “God Bless the USA”- we are going to
    need it !

  • I was a TV journalist in Kuwait in the lead up to the war in March 03. One day we went to Camp Fox, a marine corps base out near the berm. When we arrived the marine PA officer had two marines ready for us. One said he was former NYPD and the other FDNY, both claimed they were at the WTC on 9/11 and lost many friends from their stations. Both said they were happy to attack Iraq and Saddam for “what he did to them on 9/11”.

    We checked around the base and not one marine at Fox that any of us met had a doubt that Saddam was behind the 9/11 attacks. What about bin Laden we asked? just doing Saddam’s dirty work for him they all said.

    Do they still believe this even after Bush himself claimed on TV that Saddam was not behind the WTC 9/11 attacks?

  • Did anyone catch the Daily Show last year about Congress trying to get an amendment to ban desecratiing the flag, and the Republicans on the House floor all had the same message: This amendment is necessary to honor the the firefigthers and first responders who gave their all on 9/11. Jon Stewart then commented “Actually, I think the firefighters would be wondering “hey, you dicks, where’s the $270 million in healthcare you promised us?”
    To me, that sums up the GOP’s mentality concerning those who sacrifice for this country; Great for a backdrop or exploitation, but screw ’em if they need help.

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