Poll: War opposition reaches high despite reports of lower violence

Source: CNN

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Opposition to the Iraq war is at an all-time high despite reports of a reduction of violence in the country, according to a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released Thursday. Sixty-eight percent of poll respondents opposed the war, setting a new record. The level of opposition is slightly up from last month and 1 percentage point higher than the previous record of 67 percent, first set in December 2006 in a CNN/Opinion Research survey.

Support for the war in Iraq among Americans has dropped to 31 percent from 34 percent last month, the new poll found. The last time CNN reported a majority supporting the war was in October 2003, with 54 percent backing it, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll.

This year has marked the deadliest for U.S. forces in Iraq, corresponding with an American troop buildup and offensives against insurgents in the Baghdad area. The number of U.S. troops who died reached a peak for 2007 with 126 fatalities in May. Thirty-eight U.S. troops died in October, the lowest monthly figure this year. In addition to the recent decline in U.S. military deaths, militant attacks and civilian deaths also have been dropping, U.S. and Iraqi authorities said.

However, those reports don't appear to have resonated with the public, the poll suggests.

Just one quarter of Americans believe the United States is winning the war, while 62 percent said neither Americans nor insurgents are winning, the latest survey found. There has been virtually no change in the past month in the number of Americans who believe that things are going badly for the United States in the war in Iraq....

Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/11/08/war.poll/index.html

People are not going to suddenly say "Woohoo! Less deaths! Let's keep it going!"--no, they'll start to grumble, "If the Iraqis aren't slaughtering each other as predicted, why can't we leave?".

I suspect people no longer trust the corporate news media to tell the truth.

believes these reports any more. I don't.

because one side has won the war.

The Shi'ah.

...and surrendered to Iran in the South.

It's appalling that people see these developments as "good news."

:eyes:

Every time they changed the reason for the war they lost a lot of supporters and rightly so.

Even Al Franken supported the war originally because he believed Powell at the UN and I think a lot of the original war supporters were like that. When it became apparent that they weren't going to find the WMDs they lost a lot of people and given their claims it would take the discovery of a massive arsenal to justify the invasion.

The weak claim that Saddam was working with Al Qaeda only worked on people who didn't pay much attention and it mostly fizzled out when Saddam was caught. At that point they'd nearly run out of seemingly legitimate threats to the US so some supports bailed on them. The best they could do in terms of fear mongering was the "they'll follow our troops back to the US" and "we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here" and neither of those are impressing many people.

Now we're at a point where it has become (at best) a project of grossly mismanaged nation building with a huge price tag for the US in a country where we are hated. The remaining supporters are kept in line with two things. They believe that terrorists will take over Iraq when we leave and we owe the Iraqis a secure country and things like basic sanitation in their capital city. that only works if the Iraqis want us there doing that stuff and they really don't. The other bunch will support anything the president does and that group is shrinking by the day.

Finally, the $1,000,000,000,000+ price tag for the war is also pissing off a lot of former supporters because the "let's just turn it into a glass parking lot" crowd are finally waking up to the reality that we are a) failing at nation building when they don't support nation building anyway b) we're doing it in the Middle East which they really hate and c) it's costing us $1,000,000,000,000+ to do it poorly.

No amount of progress (real or otherwise) in Iraq is going to bring support for this war up much because we are throwing good people and good money into a problem and we're not getting anything out of it.