The public and the war — polls offer mixed signals

March 13, 2008

The lead headline on the Politico right now reads, “Support for war effort highest since 2006.” This is based on late-February polling from the Pew Research Center, which found that 53% of Americans now believe “the U.S. will ultimately succeed in achieving its goals” in Iraq, which is up 11 points from September 2007. (The percentage of those who believe the war in Iraq is going “very well” or “fairly well” is also up, from 30% a year ago to 48% now.)

The public’s optimism about Iraq is unusual given the trends of the last several years, but it also seems to be more complicated than the Pew poll suggests.

As the fifth anniversary of the invasion approaches next week, their conversation mirrors a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll that finds attitudes toward the nation’s deadliest conflict since Vietnam threaded with crosscurrents — particularly among those who want to set a firm timetable to pull out U.S. troops.

The survey finds the 40% of Americans who want to stay the course in Iraq are relatively united — confident the invasion was justified and the consequences of withdrawing too soon disastrous.

However, the 60% who call the invasion a mistake and want to set a timetable to get out are fractured into four distinct groups, a USA TODAY analysis of public opinion toward the war concludes.

Oh my. A majority want to withdraw, but about 20% want an immediate departure, while another 20% want to wait until Iraq is more stable. About 10% see the war as a disaster, but think we’ll be stuck there anyway for at least five more years, while another 10% are opposed to the war but have given up thinking about it. Great.

Divisions aside, six in 10 Americans said the United States should set a timetable for withdrawal and stick to it no matter what. While the Pew report hinted at optimism, the USAT poll found that just 35% said U.S. troops should remain until the situation in Iraq gets better, “a number as low as it’s ever been.”

One factor that may be influencing the numbers is the media’s coverage of the war, which seems to have largely disappeared.

The WaPo reported on a key detail from the Pew study:

Twenty-eight percent of the public is aware that nearly 4,000 U.S. personnel have died in Iraq over the past five years, while nearly half thinks the death tally is 3,000 or fewer and 23 percent think it is higher, according to an opinion survey released yesterday.

The survey, by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, found that public awareness of developments in the Iraq war has dropped precipitously since last summer, as the news media have paid less attention to the conflict. In earlier surveys, about half of those asked about the death tally responded correctly.

Related Pew surveys have found that the number of news stories devoted to the war has sharply declined this year, along with professed public interest. “Coverage of the war has been virtually absent,” said Pew survey research director Scott Keeter, totaling about 1 percent of the news hole between Feb. 17 and 23. […]

“We try not to make any causal statements about the relationship between the absence of news and what the public knows,” Keeter said. “But there’s certainly a correlation between the two. People are not seeing news about fatalities, and there isn’t much in the news about the war, whether it be military action or even political discussion related to it.”

There’s no comparable data from the USAT poll, but it’s interesting that the survey that found the most public optimism also found the most public confusion. It suggests the less Americans know about developments in Iraq, the more they’re inclined to think the war is going well.

“the U.S. will ultimately succeed in achieving its goals” in Iraq

What kind of “goals” are the result of the intentionally-engineered chaos in Iraq/n?

Which “goals” would those be? Establishing a, quote, stable, democratic Iraq? How is that a military objective unless the “goals” are establishing a permanent U.S. military prefecture in Iraq (such as in Korea, Japan, etc.)? What are the goals for American Imperialism if not a demented form of military Keynesianism?

Oh yeah, American Imperialism is meant to, quote, protect U.S. interests overseas. But the bloated “defense” budget is serving anything but U.S. interests when it is bankrupting our country to the tune of $1 Trillion a year (see 2008 “defense” budget). I guess that economic security is no longer part of the plan for “national security” for the globalists entrenched within the Federal Government.

  • The Afghanistan / Iraq Wars are always on my mind. The news media is not reporting the war due to the politics of America. The War reporting should be up front and personal. Bush/Cheney are paying big bucks to the Iraqi’s to keep insurgency down. I read the Iraqi’s are making big money on oil produced. This is good as it means that ol is being produced for sale. The bad part is the Iraqis are not spending their money to maintain the economy of Iraq. They are using the American money. so therefore we do not need to keep our troops in IRAQ. Bush is gearing up the PR to snow us with even more lies for when General BETRAY us gives us yet another pack of lies. Ask Adm Fallon, now retired.

  • Since the goal of most Americans now is getting the Hell out ASAP, and both democratic candidates at least claim they will do it, I think I feel confident our “goal” will be achieved….

  • Well of course the US will succeed in its goals if the Bush administration changes what those goals are every six months or whenever it’s convenient. The original goal was to get the WMD, but when it turned out Saddam had none, it became a mission of liberation. When making the case for the surge, the goals went from satisfying “benchmarks” to increasingly more vague terms until the public largely forgot about it.

    It seems like the administration is throwing darts and hoping that eventually one will stick.

  • From another post that I railed upon American Imperialism.

    A “war” is not “won” by preemptively invading and indefinitely occupying sovereign nations as was done in Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, and soon to be Iran (not to mention the indefinite military occupation of Japan, the Vietnam “war” and numerous other military “conflicts” and Imperial American adventurism around the globe). However, this is how a military empire is developed and perpetuated. We have 100,000 military personnel in Japan and South Korea today. How exactly does that serve “U.S. interests”? How exactly does that fit within the framework of the Constitution?

    Until the current foreign policy of empire-building is addressed and our National Defense is no longer consonant with encircling the planet with our garrisons, the downward toilet bowl-spiral of our Constitutional Republic will continue.

  • One only has to compare coverage this year on CNN to that from the BBC. CNN used to have an hour of ‘international’ news which was often the only time one heard the words “Sudan,” “Iraq,” Somalia,” “Afghanistan” et alii. Now this space is all campaign coverage (and an inexplicable week of “financial security/ plug some tart’s new book”). It really is no wonder that Hon. Sen. McCain can say without fear of being gainsaid that “no one disputes the success of the surge.”

  • Twenty-eight percent of the public is aware that nearly 4,000 U.S. personnel have died in Iraq over the past five years, while nearly half thinks the death tally is 3,000 or fewer and 23 percent think it is higher, according to an opinion survey released yesterday.

    It’s tragic that some 4,000 American lives have been wasted on George Bush’s Excellent Middle East Adventure, but how about the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives? I always grimace when I hear the hawks warning that if we withdraw from Iraq there will be a bloodbath. What do they think Iraqis have been living with these past five years?

  • CNN = canned news network, all speeches all the time. I am sure it is the cheapest thing or do. Nobody is watching the war in Iraq or Afghanistan anymore. We have to turn to alternative sources to find out what is happening, and as far as I can tell, the news is not particularly good. None of the MSM are doing their job, and personally, I am so sick of this democratic food fight, that I am losing hope. I don’t want to hear about Elliot Spitzer or Ms. Ferraro, I want the country and the Congress to pay attention to the corruption and dishonesty that has plagued our nation for the last seven years and get these bums, (R or D) out of office.

  • It’s not a war, it’s an occupation. Let’s see how many Americans think we should continue when the question is properly phrased.

    As disgusting as it is the average poll answering American does not know how many US soldiers have died, that no one knows how many Iraqis have been killed, or how many are living as exiles and how horribly we have destroyed their country makes our attitudes even more shameful.

  • We are now 13 short of an ‘official’ death toll of 4000 for American military in Iraq.

    Will the Corporate News Media continue to ignore Iraq as the 4000 count is passed? They will probably ‘mention’ it in articles & on news programs and then it will be forgotten again by the media after that.

    Why? Is it because it is not in the best interests of Corporate America to ‘dwell on the past’ when they have a Corporate Candidate to get elected!

    Root Root Root for the (corporate) home team! Go Billary McCain!!!

  • The lack of news coverage and the intractable positions of this administration (particularly invoking the “surge”) has most certainly lulled the public into a sense of resignation while taking the war off the radar. To think that economic concerns outpoll the war in importance is mindboggling — as is the lack of coverage that the two are be related, both in the short term and in the long term.

    There are many reasons why coverage is down. The spectacular insurgent attacks that were so easy to cover have diminished, opening the door to undisputed claims of success. Reporters still can’t move about the country at will, so getting the stories that require legwork aren’t reaching us.Covering the he-said, she-said campaign and the horse race is just too easy to cover and fits the media’s obsession with voyeurism, conflict, winners, losers and often meaningless drama. Then there’s the inevitable spiral of covering events that the public is interested in; if you don’t cover issues the public loses interest, justifying even less coverage. Of course, we can also speculate that downplaying the war is intentional.

    Whatever causes one attributes, the result is still the same — an effective news blackout that is affecting our perceptions of what is really going on.

  • One factor that may be influencing the numbers is the media’s coverage of the war, which seems to have largely disappeared.

    Out of sight, out of mind, as they say – particularly so long as your kid isn’t facing a draft call-up.

    Trust me, opposition to the war in Vietnam was directly correlated to the increase in draft calls.

    Nice to see the press doing their patriotic duty…

  • We met our goals:

    Saddam is out of power

    Iraq has no WMD

    We win. Yay team. Can we go home now?

  • One factor that may be influencing the numbers is the media’s coverage of the war, which seems to have largely disappeared.

    This same “black-out” happened in the summer of ’04. How the freaking conversation flipped from the two current wars back 30some years to Vietnam boggled and enraged me. After that, I made it my point to find any chat service where American soldiers may be on to get my own unfiltered understanding. Yahoo is used a lot there (iraq and afghanistan). Skype too and I assume there’s many more. Of course they aren’t at liberty to talk specifics nor do I ever ask. For me it’s more a virtual eternal flame to connect with these soldiers, young old male female red black white and camo, as they carry on even when we manage to forget.

    What I’m hearing: Morale is very very low.

  • Another interesting occurrence of mixed signals is the gallup poll on U.S. military spending and strength.

    A full 47% of respondents said that the military needed to be stronger, but only 22% said that we should spend more money on the military. Now I understand that there is a difference between these two categories, but it’s an interesting point to consider…

  • Actually, the problem is that the Pew poll appears to have been a bad one, as I’ll be saying at Daily Kos. When the poll was made public, it’s findings were so striking that I looked into writing about it. But the more I learned about the poll, the clearer it became that it is just a clunker.

  • Can someone please explain to me how a belief that ““the U.S. will ultimately succeed in achieving its goals” equates to a ” “Support for [the] war effort”?

    I mean, really. I was wholly against the stupid endeavour from before its beginning, but I have never not believed that we will, ultimately, be able to declare some sort of victory– I fully believe in the tenatiousness of our men and women in combat, and their capabilities to overcome the stupid ‘leaders’ above them, and their ability to prevail against all obstacles.

    But by no means should my belief in our Soldiers be misconstrued as “support” for this war.

  • Obviously you have read the USA Today story carefully. Can you, or anyone, reconcile these statements from your summary (which I think accurately reflects their reporting, BTW):

    1. Divisions aside, six in 10 Americans said the United States should set a timetable for withdrawal and stick to it no matter what.

    versus

    2. A majority want to withdraw, but about 20% want an immediate departure, while another 20% want to wait until Iraq is more stable.

    For my money, even when I hold the USA Today article sideways and read it standing on one foot I can’t figure out how the 20% that want to withdraw when Iraq is more stable can be described as part of the 60% that want to “set a timetable for withdrawal and stick to it no matter what”. Clearly, 20% envision a pre-condition, namely, a stable Iraq.

    From my reading of the USA Today article, 40% (or 35%, depending on the chart or text) think we can “win” and don’t contemplate a timetable for withdrawal – maybe they have in mind South Korea or Germany.

    Another 20%, quoting USA Today, “opposed the invasion but believe the United States must establish reasonable stability in Iraq before withdrawing troops”.

    Yet elsewhere in the story we are told that “In the USA TODAY poll, six in 10 Americans said the United States should set a timetable for withdrawal and stick to it no matter what.”

    Unless Americans are prepared to give 110%, or 120% to their pollsters, this simply does not add up. By my math, what USA Today should be saying is that 60% think we should aspire to a stable Iraq after which 1/3 of this group would withdraw our troops; 27% think we should commence immediate withdrawals, and 10% think it is hopeless.

    Can someone please explain to me how a belief that ““the U.S. will ultimately succeed in achieving its goals” equates to a ” “Support for [the] war effort”?

    I agree, that is a false equivalence.

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