Public’s Views on Troops in Iraq Diverge

Amid rising anxiety over events in Iraq, polls show the number of Americans who support withdrawing U.S. troops there is growing. But so is the number who want to send more troops to quell the insurgency.

This widening public split is creating new pressures on President Bush and Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), each of whom has signaled a preference for maintaining the military presence at roughly its current level.

Neither escalation nor withdrawal attracts a majority of public support. But in a trend reminiscent of public opinion during Vietnam, the stay-the-course option Bush and Kerry represent, to varying degrees, is losing ground to alternatives that might be summarized as: Win or go home.

Such hawks as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and the editors of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine are demanding that Bush stabilize Iraq by sending more troops.

Kerry is facing calls for withdrawal on the left.

In two nationwide polls last week, a plurality of Democrats said they backed removing all U.S. troops from Iraq. On Tuesday, James Steinberg and Michael O’Hanlon, two prominent Democratic foreign policy analysts, called for America to commit to removing its troops by the end of 2005.

Also, a coalition of liberal groups will decide next week whether to launch a national effort urging a gradual troop withdrawal.

“Many in the [coalition] believe we have an obligation to step up and provide a different vision so that the American people have a real choice,” said Tom Andrews, national director of Win Without War. The organization, composed of 42 groups, took a leading role in opposing the Iraq invasion.

Experts say these calls for adding or withdrawing troops may share a common root: growing uncertainty about whether Bush’s current course will succeed.

“Once people think we can’t win, then the appropriate policy that they want is for us to get out,” said Peter Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who studies public opinion about national security. “What’s propping up public support now is optimism that we are going to succeed.”

Yet recent events -- from intensified violence to the revelations of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison -- have clearly shaken that optimism.

In a Time/CNN survey last week, 60% said they believed America “can win the war in Iraq.” But only 41% said they believed the United States was now doing so. And only 52% said they believed the U.S. “will win.”

Reviewing such results, Andrew Kohut, director of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, said, “We haven’t reached the tipping point [against the war], but support is tottering.”

Ominously for Bush, recent surveys also have found a majority of Americans did not believe he had a plan to succeed in Iraq. Feaver said such doubts were a “leading indicator” of uncertainty over whether the United States could succeed at all in Iraq.

If the skepticism continues to rise, that could influence the debate over the war in two broad respects, experts believe.

One is to diminish the public’s tolerance for casualties. Many analysts say the public is more willing to accept casualties when it believes the United States is achieving its goals than when it thinks lives are being sacrificed to a lost cause.

Second, fear of failure in Iraq fuels the search for alternatives on the left and the right.

In a Washington Post op-ed article Sunday, McCain and Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) urged “an immediate and significant increase in our troop levels,” as well as an escalation of “offensive operations” against insurgents.

Similarly, Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for the New American Century -- a think tank with links to many administration neoconservatives -- sent an e-mail last week warning that the United States was risking civil war in Iraq by failing to move more decisively against Sunni and Shiite insurgents.

The mirror image of these demands is the emerging calls on the left to withdraw from Iraq.

Steinberg, deputy national security advisor under President Clinton, and O’Hanlon, a military analyst, argued in a Washington Post op-ed article Tuesday that neither Bush nor Kerry had offered a sufficient strategy “to rescue a failing policy.” Only by agreeing to leave Iraq by the end of 2005, they said, could the U.S. keep Iraqis from demanding the removal of troops sooner.

In the Time/CNN survey released last week, 30% of Americans said the U.S. should withdraw all of its troops from Iraq -- the highest level the poll has recorded to that question. But 28% said the country should send more troops, also the highest figure for that query. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll last week reported similar results.

“Americans don’t want to see us turn our backs on Iraq because they don’t want to see it become a more dangerous place,” said Kohut. “On the other hand, they don’t want to see us get involved in a quagmire.”

The unease has imposed the most immediate cost on Bush.

In all major surveys, approval for his handling of the war has skidded well below 50% -- dragging down his overall approval rating and propelling Kerry to the lead in several of the polls.

Some Democrats worry that rising antiwar sentiment could allow independent Ralph Nader, who has called for withdrawal, to siphon votes from Kerry in November. Those close to Kerry say he will not try to preempt Nader by renouncing a continued U.S. military presence in Iraq.

“The way for Kerry to win the election is not to appeal to the left’s view about what is the right course in Iraq, but to make sure that everybody to the left of Bush’s [core support] thinks he will do a better job than Bush in keeping us secure,” said one strategist familiar with the thinking in the Kerry campaign.