Polls Show American Anxiety About Iraq War
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Polls, The War On Terrorism, WarI believe we’re seeing this because the Administration hasn’t been able to demonstrate to the United States or the world what trying to stabilize the Middle East will do to help terrorism. I know I’m still sketchy about this idea at best. Especially when we see signs that Iran is helping the terrorists inside Iraq with IEDs
It also doesn’t help that terrorists attacks have been stepped up in quantity and casulaties after we went into Iraq. It doesn’t take a rocket scientists to understand that people who are against the war would link to the two together, be it an incorrect connection or not. Add that to the fact that our borders and cargo containers still aren’t secure and you get poll numbers like this.
From USA Today:
An unprecedented 57% majority say the war has made the USA more vulnerable to terrorism. A new low, 34%, say it has made the country safer. The question is critical because the Bush administration has long argued that the invasion of Iraq was undertaken to make the USA safer from terrorism.The poll of 1,004 adults, taken Friday through Sunday, also finds that one in three say the United States should withdraw all troops from Iraq â€â€? another new high. The proportion that support maintaining troop levels or sending more troops also rose a bit, to 41%. The survey’s margin of error is +/â€â€?3 percentage points.
G. Terry Madonna, a pollster at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., says support for the war is eroding in large part because the public sees no end to the U.S. military involvement there.
Here’s the good news out of that poll: a majority thinks we should stay in there and do the job we promised we’d finish. More polls are needed to see if this is truly a trend, but my gut tells me that 57% is a big signal that this is already starting to get hard-wired into the nation’s psyche.
It’s times like this when the President needs to reach out to the American people and explain the process of stabilizing the Middle East. I think that would help relieve some of this war tension.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 9th, 2005 and is filed under Polls, The War On Terrorism, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
August 9th, 2005 at 6:58 pm
the anxiety occurred when the UK got bombed, I believe. I’m concerned about terrorism too, but if Americans think about it, domestic terrror from the likes of timothy mcveigh and eric rudolph are much more prevalent. does it matter what color of skin have an affect on responses to terror? do we believe that there are no more mcveighs or rudolphs? if not, why are we not afraid of them as well as muslims?
September 20th, 2006 at 8:51 pm
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