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Mistrust and
misconceptions
By Jim
Lobe
WASHINGTON - Public support for the United
States military operation in Iraq has eroded
significantly over the past two months, as has
confidence in President George W Bush and his
administration's credibility, according to two new polls
released this week.
Solid majorities of the
public now believe that the administration's pre-war
evidence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD)
and Iraqi links to al-Qaeda amounted either to
"stretching the truth" or deliberate falsehoods,
according to a detailed survey carried out by the
University of Maryland's Program on International Policy
Attitudes (PIPA).
The same poll found that over
half of the public (53 percent) believes that the
process of rebuilding Iraq is going either "not very
well" (40 percent) or "not at all well" (13 percent),
and two-thirds believe that the United Nations should
now take the lead both on reconstruction and forming a
new government in Iraq.
Despite these
sentiments, however, 80 percent of the public say that
they believe Washington has assumed a "responsibility to
remain in Iraq as long as necessary until there is a
stable government" - as opposed to withdrawing - down
only slightly from 86 percent in April after US troops
established control over Baghdad.
"I don't see
anything on the horizon that will make the public want
to withdraw," said Stephen Kull, PIPA's director, who
added one caveat. "If the perception emerged that Iraqi
people wanted us to leave, this could change very
quickly."
A second poll published by USA Today,
CNN and Gallup found that 56 percent of the public still
considers that Iraq was worth going to war over. But
that number represented a sharp decline of 17 percentage
points from a high of 73 percent in mid-April. The same
poll found that Bush's overall job rating still stands
at a solid 61 percent, though lower than the 71 percent
standing he had just six weeks ago.
The most
recent poll results are naturally attracting unusual
attention both because of growing perceptions in the
media that Iraq could become a quagmire for the US
military and because the November 2004 presidential
campaign is essentially already under way.
While
Bush presently holds a commanding lead over any
challenger who is running for the Democratic nomination,
his father, who emerged from the first Gulf War in the
spring of 1991 with approval ratings approaching 90
percent, was handily defeated just 18 months later by
the governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, a relative
unknown at a comparable time in the election cycle.
"This bears the seeds of potential problems for
the president down the road as he looks to re-election,"
Mark Rozell, a political scientist at Catholic
University in Washington, told USA Today. As far as the
benefits accrued by Bush from the war, "I think we're
very likely on a downward slope," said Kull. "Between
now and the elections, it will probably only erode in
value."
The PIPA poll, which was unusually
detailed in its questioning, was conducted with a
nationwide sample of 1,051 respondents between June 18
and 25, while 1,003 respondents in the Gallup poll were
contacted last week. The latter found that about 53
percent of the public expects that WMD will eventually
be found in Iraq, down from 84 percent in the first days
of the war. The same percentage said it would matter "a
great deal" if they were persuaded that the
administration had deliberately misled the public about
the weapons.
The PIPA poll found that only 32
percent of the public thought the administration was
"being fully truthful" about WMD in Iraq, while 52
percent said that it was "stretching the truth, but not
making false statements" and 10 percent said the
government was "presenting evidence [it] knew was
false".
In a finding that is likely to put
Republican lawmakers on the defensive, 63 percent of the
public said Congress should "investigate" the issue. The
Republican leadership has so far resisted even using the
word "investigation", although they have gone along with
Democratic calls for hearings.
Despite the
failure of US forces to come up with any evidence of
WMD, 23 percent of the public believes that WMD have
already been found in Iraq, according to the PIPA
survey. Kull said he thought such a notion may be
ideologically driven in part, because significantly
higher percentages of Republicans believed this,
particularly "Republicans following Iraq news closely".
Eighty percent of respondents said that they
depended more on television and electronic media for
their news, and a particularly high proportion of
Republican respondents cited Fox TV, which has been
especially jingoistic in its war coverage, as their main
source. Similarly, 52 percent of respondents said that
they believed close links between Iraq and al-Qaeda have
been found; a percentage that rose sharply to 78 percent
among "Republicans following Iraq news closely".
On Iraq reconstruction, only 1 percent described
it as going "very well", while 39 percent said "somewhat
well". This fact that a majority now sees rebuilding
developments as "not very well" or "not at all well"
marks a sharp reversal from the situation in early May
and also helps explain the strong support for the "UN
taking the lead" in both building a new government and
in reconstructing Iraq.
Two-thirds of the public
continue to support the decision to go to war, although
only 46 percent said that they though it was "the best
thing for the US to do", down slightly from 53 percent
in May. Of that 46 percent, about half - or 23 percent
of the whole sample - said that they would still approve
of the decision to go to war even if it turned out that
Iraq had no WMD at all.
The PIPA poll also found
continued strong support for the UN despite the UN's
failure to approve the Iraq war. Asked whether the US
should be willing to take military action to stop a
government from conducting large-scale human rights
abuses, only 23 percent of the public said it should do
so whether or not it had broad international approval,
while 52 percent said it should do so, but only with
international support.
The poll also found that
the public was worried about increasingly negative
perceptions about the US in the rest of the world.
Fifty-four percent said that they believe that, on
average, people in other countries see US foreign policy
as negative, while 19 percent said they believed foreign
attitudes remained positive. That is a major reversal of
perceptions just two months ago, when the comparable
figures were 34 percent (negative) and 43 percent
(positive).
Almost three in four respondents
said that they considered negative opinions of the US
abroad to be either a "big problem" or "somewhat of a
problem", a view that could also erode popular support
for Bush's anti-terrorism policies.
"The public
tends to view terrorism as something that requires
international cooperation," said Kull.
(Inter
Press Service)
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