From today's PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
Public's support of war faltering
Polls show that Americans are losing confidence in the President and that they don't see themselves as safer.
By Dick Polman
Inquirer Staff Writer
The fog of war has settled over the home front.
Alarmed by the upsurge in casualties in Iraq - as evidenced by the deaths of seven Pennsylvania National Guard soldiers over the last week - and increasingly convinced that President Bush lacks a clear plan for victory, Americans in numbers unprecedented since the start of the war are losing confidence in the mission.
Bush is losing his domestic battle for hearts and minds; new polls report that, for the first time, a majority of Americans reject his contention that the war over there is making us safer over here. And support for the war has sagged to 44 percent, according to another recent poll.
Indeed, barring imminent progress in Iraq, 2005 might well be remembered as the year when public opinion went south and never came back - a mood shift roughly analogous to 1968, when domestic confidence in the Vietnam War began its irreversible slide.
There have long been gaps between administration pronouncements and battlefield realities. Witness Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's prewar prediction that the fighting "could last six days, six weeks, I doubt six months," or that 92 percent of all U.S. military deaths have occurred since Bush declared on May 1, 2003, that "major combat" was over...
... These sentiments are mirrored in the polls. When the war was a year old, two-thirds of Americans were still supporting the decision to wage it. But in the latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll, support has sagged to 44 percent. Meanwhile, 57 percent now say the war has made the United States "less safe from terrorism" - the highest share yet recorded by Gallup, and a view that opposes a core Bush argument for the war. A similar question in a Newsweek poll found even more Americans - 64 percent - do not think the war has made them safer from terrorism...
http://tinyurl.com/9sale
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Public's support of war faltering
Polls show that Americans are losing confidence in the President and that they don't see themselves as safer.
By Dick Polman
Inquirer Staff Writer
The fog of war has settled over the home front.
Alarmed by the upsurge in casualties in Iraq - as evidenced by the deaths of seven Pennsylvania National Guard soldiers over the last week - and increasingly convinced that President Bush lacks a clear plan for victory, Americans in numbers unprecedented since the start of the war are losing confidence in the mission.
Bush is losing his domestic battle for hearts and minds; new polls report that, for the first time, a majority of Americans reject his contention that the war over there is making us safer over here. And support for the war has sagged to 44 percent, according to another recent poll.
Indeed, barring imminent progress in Iraq, 2005 might well be remembered as the year when public opinion went south and never came back - a mood shift roughly analogous to 1968, when domestic confidence in the Vietnam War began its irreversible slide.
There have long been gaps between administration pronouncements and battlefield realities. Witness Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's prewar prediction that the fighting "could last six days, six weeks, I doubt six months," or that 92 percent of all U.S. military deaths have occurred since Bush declared on May 1, 2003, that "major combat" was over...
... These sentiments are mirrored in the polls. When the war was a year old, two-thirds of Americans were still supporting the decision to wage it. But in the latest CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll, support has sagged to 44 percent. Meanwhile, 57 percent now say the war has made the United States "less safe from terrorism" - the highest share yet recorded by Gallup, and a view that opposes a core Bush argument for the war. A similar question in a Newsweek poll found even more Americans - 64 percent - do not think the war has made them safer from terrorism...
http://tinyurl.com/9sale
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posted by Dan at 10:33 AM
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