Today’s White House press briefing was a rather aggressive affair, with reporters trying to pin Press Secretary Tony Snow down on what, if anything, the White House is prepared to do in response to the new report from the Iraq Study Group. There were, of course, plenty of evasive and ambiguous answers, but this was the fun one.
“The one thing they thought was absolutely important was to rebuild a sense of national unity on this, and that was their overwhelming objective.”
Now, as it turns out, it’s not at all clear that the ISG’s overwhelming objective had much of anything to do with rebuilding a sense of national unity. The panel urged Bush to strive for national unity, and the ISG’s members seem to believe their policy recommendations might help in that regard, but it’s not as if the group, by virtue of its work, thought they personally would play a role in bringing Americans together.
But if Snow agrees that rebuilding a sense of national unity is important, he’s in luck. Most Americans continue to agree on what they’d like to see in a policy.
[T]he first post-election poll from the much-respected Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) shows] that 58% of Americans want a withdrawal of all U.S. troops on a set timeline, with 18% desiring this within six months, 25% within a year, 15% within two years.
If the Iraqi government heeded the wishes of most of its own citizens (as shown by polls in that country) and demanded a U.S. pulllout in one year, 77% of Americans — including nearly 3 in 4 Republicans — would back the idea. A poll of the Iraqi public conducted by WorldPublicOpinion in September 2006 found that 71% want U.S.-led forces to commit to withdraw within a year.
Indeed, the closer one looks at the results, the more “unified” Americans appear. The problem for the Bush gang, of course, is that we’re unified around a policy that bears no resemblance to the president’s approach to the war.
Slightly better than 2 out of 3 believe the U.S. should declare that it does not plan to keep bases in Iraq indefinitely.
By an almost 2 to 1 margin (60% to 35%), respondents believe U.S. forces in Iraq are now more of a “provoking” than a “stablizing” force.
And as long as we’re on the subject, PIPA is the same respected outlet that found that Iraqis’ opinions are surprisingly in line with Americans’.
PIPA has released a … poll of Iraqi attitudes toward the U.S. occupation, and the takeaway is very, very clear: they want us to leave. 74% of Shiites and 91% of Sunnis want us to leave within a year (the number is 80% for Shiites in Baghdad). By wide margins, both groups believe U.S. forces are provoking more violence than they’re preventing, and both groups believe that day-to-day security would improve if we left. Support for attacks on U.S. forces now commands majority support among both Shiites and Sunnis. And none of this is because of successful al-Qaeda propaganda: 94% of Iraqis continue to disapprove of al-Qaeda.
Forget “national” unity, Tony Snow, we’re looking at international unity.