The Washington Post makes note that 70% of the American public thinks that Democratic criticism hurts troop morale and is being made for little more than partisan gain:
Seventy percent of people surveyed said that criticism of the war by Democratic senators hurts troop morale — with 44 percent saying morale is hurt “a lot,” according to a poll taken by RT Strategies. Even self-identified Democrats agree: 55 percent believe criticism hurts morale, while 21 percent say it helps morale.
The results surely will rankle many Democrats, who argue that it is patriotic and supportive of the troops to call attention to what they believe are deep flaws in President Bush’s Iraq strategy. But the survey itself cannot be dismissed as a partisan attack. The RTs in RT Strategies are Thomas Riehle, a Democrat, and Lance Tarrance, a veteran GOP pollster.
Their poll also indicates many Americans are skeptical of Democratic complaints about the war. Just three of 10 adults accept that Democrats are leveling criticism because they believe this will help U.S. efforts in Iraq. A majority believes the motive is really to “gain a partisan political advantage.”
Jeff Goldstein has some interesting thoughts on this poll. In general, I agree with his analysis. The Democrats are painting themselves once again as the party of pessimism, defeatism, and weakness. The position that the Democratic Party is credible on national defense doesn’t even begin to fly when they’re advocating surrendering to al-Qaeda. We’re not fighting Iraq now, we’re fighting al-Qaeda with the Iraqis at our sides. Does anyone really believe that abandoning the field of battle to al-Qaeda is a sane strategy for dealing with terrorism? Especially since we’d almost inevitably be drawn back into Iraq to take care of the problem we would have created.
The American public doesn’t trust the media in the slightest. The last Kennedy Center poll found that the media was the most singularly distrusted public institution in America. And indeed, as much as the left wants to turn Iraq into Vietnam, our troops tell an entirely different story. The military is the most trusted public institution in the country according to that Kennedy Center poll. In the battle of public information, people are going to be more likely to trust the people who have been to Iraq than the media. In fact, the polling has been quite consistent – a majority of Americans thinks that the media provides negative and unbalanced coverage of events in Iraq.
As bad as the Republicans have been this year, the Democrats are shooting themselves in the foot. Their slow drift to a pro-surrender position has further cemented their well-earned reputation as the party of weakness on national security. Their constant stream of pessimism doesn’t provide them with much traction. The American public is rightfully fed up with the state of American politics and media – and they’ve every reason to do so.
The Democrats have never been able to develop a coherent Iraq strategy. All they have been able to do is harp and criticize. That isn’t enough, and it never has been. Especially when members of the military are completely and utterly contradicting the left, the attempt to spin Iraq into a defeat is simply not working. The American people see these attacks for what they are – manifestations of shameless partisanship and nothing more. The Democrats’ attacks are foolish in the extreme. It’s one thing to offer constructive criticism – but the Democrats haven’t done that – they’ve embraced the radical left wing of Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan. When the “stars” of your party are calling the murderers of children “Minutemen” and saying that American soldiers are no better than Ba’athist thugs, it’s hard to take the patriotic high ground.
The fact is that the withdrawal position argues that America is too weak to fight a protracted war, we should surrender to a group of al-Qaeda backed thugs who indiscriminately murder children, and that we should leave Iraq a broken and shattered society. Those are the consequences of a pullout before the job is done. The Democrats cannot back away from them, try as they might. Does anyone really believe that Iraq won’t descend into anarchy unless we leave them with the training they need to fight back? Does anyone really believe that a devastated Iraq won’t turn into the perfect breeding ground for terrorism? What would such an action say about our commitment to democracy? Hell, what would that say about our commitment to basic human rights? What lesson would our enemies take from the knowledge that we don’t have the will to take the fight to them for long?
The Democratic position on the war is short-sighted, self-serving, and harms the morale of our men and women overseas. There is no sugar-coating those facts – and the American public sees it the same way. The Democrats are not even trying to grapple with the consequences of surrender in Iraq, they just want to continually attack the Bush Administration. Their message isn’t taking. For all the doubts the American people have about Iraq, they’re not idiots. They know what the score is, and they know that after 9/11 we all stood together and proclaimed that our colors don’t run.
The Democrats are asking us to cut and run.
That isn’t what Americans do.
This poll is a crock of shit. Polls consistently show that approximately 60% of Americans now believe that the war in Iraq was a mistake while approximately 55% believe the Bush administration misled America into war. If 70% believe troop morale is hurt by criticism of the war, the numbers overlap and millions of Americans who no longer support the war have to believe that THEY are hurting troop morale without their own criticism.
The only logical conclusion of the conflicting poll data is that Americans don’t believe that “troop morale” should be artificially propped up at the cost of sound policy. We’d still be in Vietnam today if our biggest fear was that “troop morale” would suffer at the prospect of criticism or ending “the mission.” We don’t fight wars to make soldiers happy….we fight wars in defense of American interests.
It’s also patently stupid to say that “troops on the ground are telling a different story” than the mainstream consensus even among many Republicans that Iraq is a mess. Most of these troops are college-age kids. We are always quick to dismiss the thoughts of college-age civilians as immature and naive, so why should we assume that a young person guarding a bridge in Fallujah is more equipped than professional analysts to judge the state of the affairs in Iraq?
Public mistrust of the media doesn’t necessarily cut in your favor either. Just as many on my side are pissed off at the media for not raising more questions about the validity of our pre-invasion mission simply because they thought some “way cool” video footage from inside a tank would ensure boffo ratings.
It’s telling that of all the data showing your house of cards is in the latter stages of collapse, you single out one poll such as this in a cynical effort to convince yourself that the Iraqi war is still popular. It isn’t. Very few Democrats favor immediate withdrawal while the vast majority of Democrats AND Republicans favor either a long-term timeline for withdrawal or a systematic troop reduction over the next 18 months. You guys are fighting a March 2003 PR battle in November 2005 and are losing battle. The longer you continue to delude yourself into thinking that voters are as stuck on stupid as you are, the more out of touch you look and the better the Democrats’ 2006 prospects become
Of course it is – how could it if it challenges the liberal orthodoxy?
The difference between this poll and the others is that this poll doesn’t oversample Democrats by huge amounts as others have.
Wrong. The logical conclusion is that even if the American people don’t think that the beginning of the war may have been right, they don’t want to see us lose.
Gee, I don’t know. Maybe because they’re in Fallujah and see the situation first-hand?
And again, the Kennedy poll finds the military is the most trusted public institution in the country. The press is the least. I know who I’d be more likely to trust to give me the straight story in Iraq, and it sure as shit isn’t the mainstream media.
The polling data has shown that a consistent majority thinks that the reporting on Iraq is skewed to the negative – 52% in the Kennedy Center poll.
Talk about projection!
It’s the Democrats who are stuck in 2003, harping on the pre-war intelligence they never bothered to view at the time. Meanwhile it’s the Republicans and a handful of Democrats who are actually concentrating on winning the war rather than arguing about how quickly we should surrender.
It’s the anti-war side that is “stuck on stupid”. The media continually fails to present a balanced or accurate picture of the situation in Iraq. Every single soldier or family of a soldier I’ve talked to has said the same thing – our troops can’t believe the crap that the media reports and how it gets everything wrong. The American public is smart enough to know that the Democrats have no position on Iraq except surrender, and that they’re whole position is based on nothing more than the crudest partisan advantage.
Keep deluding yourself all you want, but if the Democrats are dumb enough to think that the pro-surrender position will work any better in 2006 than it did in 2004 or 2002, they deserve what they get.
Clinging to the findings of a singular poll that ambiguously cuts in your favor shows how desperate you are to come up with any news capable of even being spinned into something positive. I’ll grant you that many polls (like CBS) oversample Democrats, but we all know that when these polls are averaged out, the end result is pretty close to the truth. So when the aggregate of polls shows that 60% of Americans now think the war was a mistake and 55% believe we were misled into war, that tells me that your overreaching with the interpretation of this poll. Just because 70% of the public believes criticism at home hurts troop morale clearly does not translate into 70% support for “staying the course.”
And I’m sorry but a 19-year-old soldier guarding a bridge in Fallujah is in no better position to persuasively opine on the macro-level effectiveness of our policy in Iraq than a Gustavus biology major is equipped to opine on the health of his alma mater’s financial health. My best friend is in Iraq and says it’s an unimaginable mess from his perspective, but as a go-fer who gets his orders from above and then acts upon them, he realizes that perhaps he’s not the most qualified person to evaluate the at-large condition in Iraq. If only the individual soldiers you are speaking to were humble enough not to fancy themselves generals or military analysts capable of diagnosing a clean bill of health for our Iraq policy.
And I don’t believe Jack Murtha is lying when he cites that about half of the people at the Pentagon he has spoken with concur on the need for a looming withdrawal from Iraq, but are forbidden from saying so publicly. The military is under the authority of the Commander in Chief and must adhere to his requests and policy choices. I can assure you that a little “glasnost” in the military would unveil some stark divisions within, just as there are stark divisions among retired generals who are no longer subservient to executive branch orthodoxy.
Saying that the Democrats shouldn’t be investigating the questionable validity of pre-war intelligence is like saying that the Watergate crimes shouldn’t have been investigated in 1973 and 1974, only a MUCH bigger story since the magnitude of leading America into war on false premises is unprecedented. Even if no official crime was committed, the American people should know about the manipulations and/or falsehoods that led to perhaps the biggest mistake in U.S. history. While more energy should be expended on an exit strategy, this is not an either/or proposition. The mind-blowing errors that got us into this mess should not simply be forgotten because it’ll help Bush’s poll numbers.
Pro-surrender Democratic policy? In 2002? You mean when the majority of Congressional Democrats gave Bush authority to go to war? And who besides Dennis Kucinich was advocating “surrender” in 2004? It’s this kind of partisan stupidity that is catching up to you as the public has moved solidly towards the Democratic position that the war was a mistake and that we were misled into war. The public and the Democrats are divided on the issue of a withdrawal, but with each passing month the momentum shifts towards a timeline for withdrawal. The Democrats will undoubtedly have a difficult time uniting behind a withdrawal plan next year, but a divided party where the majority at least realizes that things are going badly still strikes me as a better option than a united party insisting we need to “stay the course” off a cliff, and thus going increasingly against the grain of the voting public.
And at the end of the day, all the sophistry in the world doesn’t change the facts. Iraq is not Vietnam, it is not a “quagmire”, and the soldiers who actually are there and experience the reality of Iraq every single day know a whole hell of a lot more than some blowdried network news anchordroid.
Quite frankly, I (and a majority of the American public) put a hell of a lot more credibility in someone who’s actually been to Iraq then in some mainstream media jackass who sits in the Green Zone and relies on former Ba’athist minders to give them their only view in Iraq.
The Democrats have no plan for Iraq. Murtha’s plan is a joke – he wants us to draw down troops but still keep them in the area so that when everything inevitably goes to shit, we have the wonderful opportunity to start at square 1 all over again. Such a brilliant piece of strategy that is.
The American people don’t want to give up in Iraq until the job is done. That’s the right thing to do. Priority #1 should not be in deciding how soon we can bug out, but what we can do to win the war. The Democrats are tone deaf on Iraq, and the fact is that we are winning in Iraq.
All the Democrats want to do is snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and no responsible American should allow them to do so.
Your circle of soldier friends are Republicans, mine are Democrats. Yours view the war in Iraq as a success, mine wonder every day what the hell we’re doing there. If there was anything approaching unanimity among U.S. soldiers regarding the situation in Iraq, you’d at least have a valid point…but when you consider that among Iraqi war veterans running for Congress in 2006, the Democrats have about a 10-1 advantage, it’s clear that the opinion of Jay Reding’s soldier friends is not one and the same with every other soldier that is or was in Iraq.
Murtha’s timeline is exaggerated, but his troop deployment plan is just what the doctor ordered. With U.S. troops on the periphery, we become a less inviting target of the insurgency and without Americans to kill, the insurgency very likely flames out. And without the U.S. serving a crutch for complacent Iraqis to lean on, the Iraqi Security Force has to train its soldiers in a timeframe shorter than the “two and a half years and counting” that they’ve accomplished so far. If anything, the media has been too congenial about the appalling lack of progress made by the Iraqi Security Forces, which thus far has taken approximately 10 times longer to become combat-ready as the average unit of American soldiers. The more the information comes out that the Iraqis have not been taking their own security seriously because America is propping them up, the more appealing Murtha’s plan will be.
There’s no perfect solution to Iraq..and the fact that clueless war planners were delusionally attached to the premise that the invasion would be followed by years of flowers and confetti rather than bombs and gunfire only dug our trench deeper. There’s no way to snatch defeat from the jaws of a non-existent victory….and most Americans are not under any illusion that what we’ve accomplished meets any definition of victory. You can say that Iraq is not Vietnam all you want, but as the occupation plods on year after ineffective year, the rate of American deaths per month continues to increase, and Iraqi oil production continues to remain 25% below pre-invasion levels, it’s gonna be increasingly difficult to find an audience for that partisan talking point.
Read the news lately? The “insurgency” has been targeting Iraqis more so than Americans. Americans aren’t soft targets – Iraqi hospitals, schools, and cafes are. The terrorists don’t give a damn who they kill so long as they get their 72 virgins.
Which ignores the fact that it takes time to train a soldier. Hell, it isn’t a matter of training soldiers, it’s a matter of training an entire army from the ground up. Nothing of the old Iraqi Army was worth salvaging, the US had to not only fight off the insurgency, but train as well. It is only now that that situation is stabilizing. Iraq needs both trained soldiers, but a qualified officer corps. Those don’t grow overnight.
Yeah, because the Iraqis aren’t Americans. We’ve had the world’s best military for the past 50 years. They had a kleptocratic system in which anyone who showed an ounce of initiative was executed. If you think that they’re not pulling their weight, you’re dead wrong. Plus, American soldiers don’t take the risk of getting blown up while waiting to enlist. Yet thousands of Iraqis take that risk every day.
Except for the part where that isn’t even remotely true…
The people on the ground would beg to differ – but hey, they’re only in Iraq, so what do they know? It’s not like they know as much as the people in the media, especially about military matters, right?