Most American see war in Iraq as winnable, So why the defeatism?
August 30, 2007 10:44 AM EDT
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A new United Press International/Zogby poll released yesterday says that 54% of Americans see the War in Iraq as winnable. So why do we keep hearing there is no hope? Well 66% of Democrats think we have already failed. So now with elections coming Democrats are playing to the base and claiming a defeat in Iraq. The Democratic Presidential Cantidates do not help as they most certainly will not take a different path in fear of turning away a majority of primary voters. 86% of Democrats say the Surge is not working even when the progress is being noted daily. Wars should be fought on the field and support for the soldiers on the battlefield should not be determined by the opinion of the masses. Party Politics has taken true leadership out of our political system and now made "leaders" cower to the will of their base.
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Comments: 39
The dem candidates, including Barak Obama would stay in Iraq with an as-yet to named force. Even John Edwards would keep the troops in to prevent the genocide that is surely going to happen the moment we withdraw.
Withdrawal serves no interest to America. Everyone in the world would be asking if the most powerful nation on earth doesn't care about the future of the most dangerous and murderous part of the world,,,,what WILL American care about??
Our allies will look for help and insurance elsewhere. Our enemies will think we are vulnerable and may try to take over, with more deaths and war.
Sure, it's unpopular for those that can't see the big picture or beyond their hatred of GW. But This country has been through worse and has come out victorious.
Mit......er..Evie, what are YOUR THOUGHTS? Do you have any? All you ever do is cut and paste from OTHERS.
To be quite honest, I think most of this comes from two sources.
First we have the members of the senate, that because their party lost the elections, or what ever the flavor of complaint is that day, they will attack almost everythiing the president does, and create most of the issues that support their complaints.
Second is the major news services, which are always in the market of selling fear not truth. Remember fear sells much better than the truth does.
When you combine these two issues, with the lacking effort of people to actually look up and try to understand an issue, then you get a bunch of cattle willingly lead to the Defeatism trough.
Of course we CAN win the war, we have nukes! (Obviously that is NOT the answer though!) If you read the rest of the poll stats, you can see that most people think we ARE losing and will not win in the end.
I want to know how they define "winning". We can't "win" their civil war. If it is just defeating Al Qaeda in Iraq, then that is a small job since only 5% of the violence is even from foreign fighters and if we LEAVE, then we will defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq because they won't stay there when the local militias drive them away. The only reason they allow them now is because they have a common enemy "the occupiers", US.
To me, the only way to "win" is to clean up the humanitarian crisis we have created and help these people to go home to a safe and functioning country. That is going to take an international effort and big of piece of humble pie for the US. It will be a long, expensive effort that cannot be done militarily and we have to admit that we have totally messed up from the start in this "war".
I always appreciate your commentary it is always well informed and thought provoking.
I believe we have already won most of the battle there and will continue to stay on top until all is realized.
You are so defensive and argumentative all the time. You really should look at that side of yourself a little bit more closely. Oh and um, you are not the only person who did not address the article but took swings at the author and made snide comments, I guess you felt guilty.
Cindy: You are joking, right? GWB a great president? He is going to go down in history as probably the worst, most destructive president every. I love how you classify anyone who legitimately disagrees with his policies and decisions as haters. Has it ever occurred to you that many of us have the ability to look at the disastrous decisions he made and simply state he made some really serious errors? Try reading a copy of Fiasco and then get back to me.
ModernDay: Progress is not being made in Iraq every day. The purpose of the surge, which I have stated before and which your god-like President defined was to give the Iraqi government time and space to take care of the political problems that need to be addressed. Using this definition (which remember is your blessed president's own definition) the "surge" is an utter failure. The interim report from the GAO says that the Iraqi government has utterly failed to address much less solve the vast majority of the issues which Mr. Bush agreed were adequate benchmarks to measure success.
Have there been small improvements in some areas on the ground? Sure there have been. And as soon as the U.S. troops withdraw the insurgency flows back in within hours. This war cannot be won on the ground. It has to be won by the government doing the political work, establishing the laws, and somehow enforcing them. It will be won when common services such as water, sewage, electricity, etc. are restored, the streets are safe (or relatively so) and the various factions begin working together to cut the violence. None of this has happened and the administration is spinning so hard it's practically falling over.
Mind you this is not the fault of the troops. They are doing the best they can. It's the fault of the Iraqi government for refusing to even remain and try to work, opting instead to sit by the pool popping bonbons while our troops continue to die for their right to do so. I don't suppose it would hurt if the administration had some clear definition of what a win would entail. As I advised Cindy, read Fiasco then get back to me. BTW don't you 29%ers knees get sore with all the jerking?
When reached by phone last week, Cliff Zukin, a political science professor and polling expert at Rutgers University, suggests that journalists should generally be wary of any Zogby interactive poll.
"The Zogby stuff, on scientific grounds, is quite questionable," says Zukin. "Online, Internet, opt-in polling, where people volunteer to be respondents, doesn't really have a basis in scientific validity. There are two kinds of samples in the world. There are probability samples, and there are non-probability samples."
The Zogby interactive polls, says Zukin, clearly fall into the latter camp. "With probability samples, when everybody has a known chance of being selected, you can make pretty valid inferences about the population from which it is drawn," says Zukin. "You can't do that at all with self-selected surveys. That's a problem."
Another problem with Internet-based polling, says Zukin, is that, in general, Web and email-based surveys tend to overvalue the opinions of young people. A group that is notoriously lousy at showing up to actually vote.
"Internet coverage is now about two-thirds of the population," says Zukin. "But it's really age-skewed and, to a lesser extent, education-skewed, in the wrong way for voters. It's younger people who are online. It's older people who are not online. It's older people who vote. And younger people who don't."
"It's certainly not the gold standard," says Zukin.
It's a point that wasn't lost on at least one revered political journalist in Austin — the Texas Monthly's Paul Burka. Writing last week on his recently launched blog, Burka did a nice job of unpacking the shortcomings of both polls. In particular, his critique of the Zogby-Journal Battleground States Poll should be required reading for journalists reporting on midterm elections around the country. (Burka also provides some interesting thoughts about the automated phone call methodology that underlies the Rasmussen poll.)
"The [Zogby-Journal] poll's Web site describes the process as 'interactive' — that is, it's an Internet poll, based on a database of individuals who have signed up to participate," writes Burka. "It is not a random sample; the polling organization solicits responses by e-mail. In addition, the poll takers make about 20 to 50 phone calls in the state where a race is taking place. The poll does not mention a screen for likely voters."
"As I have written repeatedly, the poll that I think is the least credible is Zogby/Wall Street Journal/Battleground States," adds Burka. "I can't believe the Journal allows its name to be attached to this so-called poll."
http://www.cjr.org/politics/how_reliable_is_the_zogbyjourn.php
Amazon's summary: According to conventional wisdom, Iraq has suffered because the Bush administration had no plan for reconstruction. That's not the case; the State Department's Future of Iraq group planned out the situation carefully and extensively, and Middle East expert David Phillips was part of this group. White House ideologues and imprudent Pentagon officials decided simply to ignore those plans. The administration only listened to what it wanted to hear.
Losing Iraq doesn't just criticize the policies of unilateralism, preemption, and possible deception that launched the war; it documents the process of returning sovereignty to an occupied Iraq. Unique, as well, are Phillips's personal accounts of dissension within the administration.
The problems encountered in Iraq are troubling not only in themselves but also because they bode ill for other nation-building efforts in which the U.S. may become mired through this administration's doctrine of unilateral, preemptive war. Losing Iraq looks into the future of America's foreign policy with a clear-eyed critique of the problems that loom ahead.
"Don't wish life was easier!! Wish you were better" --Jim Rohn, Business Philosopher
I'm curious how you'd define victory in this conflict. It's not like there are only two sides.
As I have stated before, people need to look at the bigger picture, not the picture that the media is stating day after day after day in regards to the deaths, bombings, etc.
In my opinion, the Democrats love to flip flop depending on what is popular with the American people at the time. Isn't funny that several Democrats supported the war in the beginning, but as soon as things took a turn for the worse or the military forces experienced setbacks/obstacles, they immediately changed their stance. Under the given circumstances, I do feel that we have made progress forward and eventually it will be up to the Iraqis themselves to either find some neutral ground or end up in a full blown civil war.
Cindy did bring up an interesting point about "the hatred of GW is greater than the love for country," which I find is the attitude of most Americans sorry to say.
Think about this, would Americans have the same feelings if a different President like Hillary Clinton or Obama decided to continue what GW finished??? Just a hypothetical question.
Side Note: The Government Accountability Office will release a report very soon that concludes that the Iraqi Government has failed on at least 13 out of 18 political and security benchmarks. So much for your troop surge... if that was going to work at all, it would have taken a lot more troops than that, and deployed a lot earlier than 2007.
Aside from the fact that this war is illegal and never should have been waged to begin with, it might not have been so bad if we had at least halfway competent leadership in the White House.
Modern Day: Straight party line from the Bush play book there. Too bad it's simply not true. Saddam, at the time we invaded, was no more a threat to this country than you are. Also, many other countries, including the United States and Israel choose to ignore the UN when it suits them. Wasn't it Mr. Bush who declared that they were "irrelevant" when they refused to rubber stamp his invasion plan? If Mr. Bush so respected the UN and its mandates, then why did he refuse to allow the inspectors to complete their work as the UN asked? Was it because the early reports said there were no WMD and no weapons programs, and that Mr. Hussein wasn't a real threat to anyone other than his own countrymen?
The Chive: You make a very good point. I honestly believe that had the U.S. gone into Iraq with a detailed plan for the occupation and gone all out to crush the insurgency and then the sectarian violence, and avoided a huge number of other blunders, the situation on the ground would be considerably different than it is today. They chose to go in with a fantasy outcome. Fiasco quotes several administration sources who stated to the press that we would be in Iraq no more than 120 days before we could turn over the government to the Iraqis and leave.
He did invade another country and then kick out inspectors.
Most people do not think that the war is winnable. This includes Republicans. It is not a Democratic Party issue anyway. The war belongs to the Republicans - plain and simple.
At the time we invaded the inspectors were saying that they were finding zilch. That did not agree with what Mr. Bush et al wanted us to believe, so we ordered the inspectors out so we could invade before everyone figured out there were no weapons labs and no caches of weapons. It doesn't matter what he had before. You don't invade a country for something they might have had 8-10 years ago but which they don't have now. To be honest, you don't invade another country unless they have attacked you or you have unshakable evidence that they are about to. Neither is the case here.
To be honest, I don't have a clue as to why Mr. Bush was so gung ho to invade Iraq. Maybe he was torqued because Saddam tried to off his father. Maybe it was because he promised his big oil buddies he would. I honestly don't know. Somehow today I doubt that he does either.
Actually the inspectors FOUND nothing, they felt that the Iraqis were HIDING a lot. They had not changed. They met with Al Queda and were funding some of their activity that we know.