As Iraq effort drags on, doubts mount at home

The war in Iraq is entering a critical stage, and it has as much to do with public attitudes at home as it does with boots on the ground.

Public patience appears to be growing thinner - a mood now echoed by some Republicans in Congress. The landscape of public and political opinion remains nuanced: Many who didn't support going to war say the US must persevere toward an eventual hand-off to Iraqi forces. Yet in interviews and polls, that fortitude is matched by growing doubts, with rising numbers of Americans calling for their troops to come home.

Among the recent signs:

• As US combat fatalities pass the 1,700 mark and the "global war on terrorism" stretches out longer than US involvement in World War II, the number of Americans who say the US should begin withdrawing troops from Iraq - nearly 60 percent in a new Gallup poll - is at its highest level in two years.

• Army recruiters are finding young men and women - and especially their parents - increasingly unwilling to sign up for training and what is likely to be more than one deployment overseas. Last month, the Army's original goal was to attract 8,050 new recruits; instead, only about 5,000 headed for boot camp. Applications to all three US military academies have dropped as well.

• Governors of both parties have expressed concern about National Guard troops not being available for summer fire fighting and other local emergencies. Together with reserve forces, those citizen-soldiers make up about 40 percent of all GIs in Iraq. Most of them are established individuals with families and careers, and they typically don't hesitate to send back unvarnished reports from the war zone.

All this comes as military commanders in Iraq are saying - on the record - that it's likely to take years to adequately train Iraqi forces, and some Republican lawmakers are talking about the administration's failure to anticipate the insurgency.

And yet the public - even those who opposed the war in the first place - seems not to be of a mind to "cut and run."

Like Jack Johnson, who played professional football for the Chicago Bears back in the 1950s and is now retired. "It's very discouraging that there doesn't seem to be an end in sight," he says. "It seems like we shouldn't have gotten involved, but we are involved and we can't get out."

Or Debbie Wilson, also of Chicago, a single mother of six, including two sons of military age. "I feel that we're in so deep ... that we can't just pull out," she says.

Still, all of this increases the political pressure on the Bush administration, and especially on members of Congress thinking about next year's election, as they sort their way through the fighting and negotiating and nation-building that go on simultaneously in Iraq.

"I feel that we've done about as much as we can do," says Rep. Walter Jones (R) of North Carolina, who's joining other lawmakers this week in introducing legislation calling for a timetable for US troop withdrawal.

Experts say part of this has to do with the messy and dangerous nature of counterinsurgency, and part has to do with American attitudes toward war in general - particularly since it's been a generation since the US was involved in extended armed conflict.

"It is easy to defeat enemies if our goal is simply to destroy them," says military analyst Loren Thompson at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va. "The military can do so quickly, and the public will be supportive. But it is nearly impossible to remold them in our image, because the military lacks the skills and the public lacks the patience."

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