US public's support of Iraq war sliding faster now
Four years after the US invasion, Americans who now regret the war outnumber supporters by 14 percentage points.
from the March 20, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 4
"There's a huge partisan division on the war, and it's far larger for this war than for any previous military engagement going back to World War II," says Dr. Jacobson.
Republicans form a large majority of the 40 percent of Americans who stand by the decision to go to war, versus the 54 percent who do not, according to the Pew Research Center in Washington. Until recently, GOP support has held fairly steady in the face of the long exodus of independents and the early departure of Democrats.
– Brian Green of Florida
In an address Monday, Bush urged Americans to be patient. The mission to help the Iraqi government secure its capital will take months, and fewer than half the troop reinforcements being sent have arrived in Baghdad, he said.
The presidential plea isn't likely to carry much weight with Keith Fraser, a Demo- crat whose support for the war faded long ago. "I wasn't a strong believer for very long, probably that first year," says Mr. Fraser, a retired naval officer in Swanzey, N.H. "I really look back upon it as being a very naive time for me."
Mr. Fraser did not vote for Bush in either election. But on the eve of the Iraq war, he found himself cautiously optimistic that the invasion would take care of a troubled situation left unresolved from Operation Desert Storm. And Colin Powell's presentation before the United Nations stirred up anxieties lingering from 9/11, he said in a phone interview.
"The absence of WMD [weapons of mass destruction] was the first chink in the armor," says Fraser. "Once you start to question that, then you begin to question other things, like was Al Qaeda sitting at the right arm of Saddam Hussein? You just began to wonder, is everything you're hearing the truth?"
Failure to find WMDs also affected Frank Hilts, a retired cop from Stone Mountain, Ga. Early in the war Mr. Hilts believed that invading Iraq not only was morally right, but also that it was crucial for national security and the war on terror.
After it became clear that no major caches of WMDs would be found in Iraq, Hilts, an independent who voted for Bush in 2000, went from cautious support to outright calls for impeachment, for shielding the "real" reasons for going to war as well as for mishandling the operation.
The view that the Bush administration deliberately misled the public about WMDs has become more pervasive over the course of the war and is now held by 54 percent of the public, according to a CNN/Opinion Research poll this month.
"It isn't really our war anymore," says Hilts, adding that Americans are now stuck refereeing a civil war.
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