Frank Warner digs into the latest Pew Poll on Iraq and finds that “Americans now are slightly more optimistic about the Iraq war.”
In the last month, the percent of Americans saying the war is going “not too well†or “not well at all†dropped from 67 to 56.
Sample of 1,503. The Pew Research Center took the poll of 1,503 people from March 21 to March 25.
The portion of Americans who said the U.S. invasion of Iraq was the “wrong decision†dipped from an all-time high of 54 percent in February to 49 percent in March.
The percent calling the Iraq invasion the “right decision†rose from 40 to 43.
Now, this is good news, especially coming on the heels of the surge. Either the lack of bad headlines, or the promotion to the front page of successes in capturing and killing terrorists/insurgents, are driving these numbers.
But, what I have to question is the variability of the “right decision.” Going into Iraq was either the right or wrong thing to do. Once you make that decision, how does your opinion change? You can certainly think things have gone well, badly, or somewhere in the middle, but how does that change the opinion you had at the start?
Now, what I may be grousing about is really just an artifact of the polling methodology. The pollsters may not give people the options that give them, right decision/executed badly, which is probably a popular opinion
Of course, popularity is no way to run a war, despite what the leftist/liberal/progressive/democrats seem to think.
But, come to think of it, if the trends keep going like this, I expect one of two things. They can either turn into the wind, and fight harder for surrender, or turn with the wind, and support the surge and the President (while claiming that their rhetoric helped convince the Iraqis that they had to step up to the plate.) I imagine, that the more moderate Democrats can be convinced to follow the latter course with these new results.
Let me play Devil’s advocate for a moment.
I’ve been an unrelenting supporter of the war in Iraq. To put it succinctly, the region cannot be allowed to simmer endlessly with our foreign policy consisting of watching that the pot doesn’t boil over. There is a crying need for significant democratic reform. Its not even really an issue of solving all the problems, but setting things on a path where those problems can eventually resolve themselves.
Having said that, things have not been going well in Iraq. History will eventually record the reasons, but if I’m guessing, its probably the same reasons its always been—political and personnel obstacles. In every American war, the “wrong” generals had to be removed; usually with attendant political complications.
Also in every American war, the see-saw of political popularity has been a defining factor. In Iraq, the threat of the Democrats engineering our defeat cleared the decks for Petraeus and built a fire under the Iraqi government.
In this case, as with previous wars, the war’s popularity was a valuable goad for change.
Depends on how you look at it. We can say, in retrospect, that a decision taken was bad based on the outcome, even if based on what we knew at the time, the decision seemed like the right thing to do.
Applied specifically to the Iraq war, lots of people are saying, “If we knew then what we know now…” A lot of that is just political cowardice, but some is honest reappraisal.
But what we cannot know is how things would have played out if we had not gone into Iraq, and that part of the calculation is missing from the analyses of most war critics.
And most war supporters.