| Author | Message | | Guest-cdbc | | Posted: Thu Jan 23, 2003 7:48 pm Post subject: 61 % of US Public Wants to Give UN Inspectors More Time |
| 61 % of US Public Want to Give UN Inspectors More Time
NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll (just mentioned) shows that 61 percent of the American public wants to give UN Weapons Inspectors more time as such is what the France and Germans want as well, but the JINSA Zionist extremists (of the Perle/Wolfowitz/Cheney cabal in the Bush regime) want an invasion of Iraq as soon as possible for Israel and oil.
There was also a Washington Post poll that came out yesterday. More about such is included below. | |  | | Anglo Thug | | | | Guest-c651 | | Posted: Fri Jan 24, 2003 5:50 am Post subject: Support For a War With Iraq Weakens in US Public |
| http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23564-2003Jan21.html
washingtonpost.com
Support For a War With Iraq Weakens
Majority in Poll Critical of Bush's Record on Economy
By Dana Milbank and Richard Morin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, January 22, 2003; Page A01 Seven in 10 Americans would give U.N. weapons inspectors months more to pursue their arms search in Iraq, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll that found growing doubts about an attack on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
In addition to the public's skepticism about military action against Iraq, the poll found that a majority of Americans disapproved of President Bush's handling of the economy for the first time in his presidency. The number of Americans who regard the economy as healthy has not been lower in the past nine years, and fewer than half supported the tax cut plan Bush has proposed as a remedy.
The findings underscore twin challenges for Bush as he hits the midpoint of his term. In next week's State of the Union address, Bush will try to rally flagging support for a confrontation with Iraq and convince Americans that he can restore prosperity at home.
Overall, support for Bush has dropped to levels not seen since before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, with 59 percent of Americans approving of his work. That is still a comfortable level of popularity, and Bush advisers and analysts expect Americans will rally to his side if hostilities begin in Iraq. Still, Bush's overall standing, buoyed by the 71 percent who approve of his work against terrorism, masks deepening concerns about Bush's economic and foreign policies.
On the economy, Americans disapproved of the job Bush has done by 53 percent to 43 percent; that represents a 7-percentage point shift from December. Only a quarter of Americans described the economy as excellent or good, down 10 points from December.
Support for Bush's remedy for the economy, a $670 billion tax cut unveiled earlier this month, has drawn lukewarm support. Most Americans -- 61 percent -- perceive that it benefits the wealthy, compared with 9 percent who think it helps the middle class or the poor and 23 percent who said it treats all equally.
By a margin of 7 percentage points, Americans opposed the cornerstone of Bush's proposal, the elimination of the tax on stock dividends. By more than 2 to 1, respondents said they would rather have more spending on education, health care and Social Security than a tax cut, and a sizable majority said they would rather the money be used to balance the federal budget.
Americans exhibited similar ambivalence about the tax cut Bush proposed in 2001, and he prevailed in enacting most of his plan.
On Iraq, which is likely to dominate political discourse in the coming months, the president has slipped but still has relatively high support. Fifty-seven percent of Americans back military action, down from 62 percent in mid-December; similarly, 50 percent of Americans said they approved of Bush's handling of the Iraqi situation, down from 58 percent a month ago.
Such levels of support are far below the near-unanimous support for an attack against Afghanistan; support for that operation exceeded 90 percent in the weeks before military action began. Eric Larson, who studies national security and public opinion at the Rand research group, said that was a "unique case" because of the direct link to an attack on U.S. soil. A better comparison, Larson said, was the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when support for war was 45 percent before the attack began but quickly rallied. "In comparison to other historical incidents, this seems to be extraordinarily high support for a military option," Larson said.
The survey found Americans evenly split on whether Bush has presented enough evidence against Hussein. Fifty-eight percent said they would like to see more evidence, and 71 percent said the United States should make public its own evidence if the U.N. inspectors can't find hard evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
In one clear sign of public caution on Iraq, 43 percent of respondents said the U.N. inspectors should have as much time as they like to scour Iraq. A quarter said the inspectors should have "a few months" or more. Another quarter supported a deadline of a few weeks or less for the inspections.
The findings, coming a day after France suggested it might block a U.N. resolution authorizing force against Iraq, put the public at odds with Bush. The president yesterday voiced frustration with inspections, asking, "How much time do we need to see clearly that he is not disarming?"
Matthew Dowd, who coordinates White House polling, said the slipping support is temporary. "For every president, when the action is close, the public rallies to the commander in chief," he said. He attributed the slippage to "a lot of back and forth in the media" before Bush explains the rationale for war. "As soon as they hear the explanation from him, public opinion will move," Dowd said.
Still, the doubts about Bush's Iraq policy are broad and deep. In barely a month, Bush's performance rating on Iraq has dropped 16 percentage points, to 42 percent, among young people 18 to 30 years old. Bush also lost support among middle-aged Americans but held his ground among seniors.
Democrats express growing opposition to Bush's Iraq policies. In December, slightly more than half of all Democrats disapproved of his handling of Iraq; today nearly three in four don't like the job he is doing, the Post-ABC poll found.
Overall opposition to the war also increased among virtually every demographic group. In the past five weeks, the proportion who rejected using military force in Iraq has increased by 19 percentage points among African Americans, 13 percentage points among those 31 to 44 years old, and 12 percentage points among those earning $50,000 to $75,000.
Bipartisan support for military action that Bush had maintained for more than a year after Sept. 11, 2001, has vanished, the survey found.
For the first time in Post polls conducted since the terrorist attacks, a majority of Democrats -- 57 percent -- rejected taking military action to topple Hussein, up 8 percentage points from mid-December.
Among those political independents and those only loosely aligned with either party, 55 percent favored military action, down from 61 percent last month. Support for the war dipped slightly among Republicans, from 81 percent to 78 percent.
The Post-ABC poll is based on telephone interviews with 1,133 randomly selected adults conducted from Jan. 16 to Jan. 20. Margin of sampling error for the overall results is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Assistant director of polling Claudia Deane contributed to this report. | | | | Guest-c651 | | Posted: Fri Jan 24, 2003 5:54 am Post subject: Bush wants war, Pentagon urges caution |
| Role reversal: Bush wants war, Pentagon urges caution
By DOUG THOMPSON
Jan 22, 2003, 01:18
Senior Pentagon officials are quietly urging President George W. Bush to slow down his headlong rush to war with Iraq, complaining the administration’s course of action represents too much of a shift of America’s longstanding “no first strike” policy and that the move could well result in conflicts with other Arab nations.
“We have a dangerous role reversal here,” one Pentagon source tells Capitol Hill Blue. “The civilians are urging war and the uniformed officers are urging caution.”
Capitol Hill Blue has learned the Joint Chiefs of Staff are split over plans to invade Iraq in the coming weeks. They have asked Secretary of State Donald Rumseld to urge Bush to back down from his hard line stance until United Nations weapons inspectors can finish their jobs and the U.S. can build a stronger coalition in the Middle East.
“This is not Desert Storm,” one of the Joint Chiefs is reported to have told Rumseld. “We don’t have the backing of other Middle Eastern nations. We don’t have the backing of any of our allies except Britain and we’re advocating a policy that says we will invade another nation that is not currently attacking us or invading any of our allies.”
Intelligenced sources say some Arab nations have told US diplomats they may side with Iraq if the U.S. attacks without the backing of the United Nations. Secretary of State Colin Powell agrees with his former colleagues at the Pentagon and has told the President he may be pursuing a "dangerous course."
An angry Rumsfeld, who backs Bush without question, is said to have told the Joint Chiefs to get in line or find other jobs. Bush is also said to be “extremely angry” at what he perceives as growing Pentagon opposition to his role as Commander in Chief.
“The President considers this nation to be at war,” a White House source says,” and, as such, considers any opposition to his policies to be no less than an act of treason.”
But conversations with sources within the Bush administration, the Pentagon, the FBI and the intelligence community indicate a deepening rift between the professionals who wage war for a living and the administration civilians to want to send them into battle.
Sources say the White House has ordered the FBI and CIA to “find and document” links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the 9-11 terrorist attacks.
“The implication is clear,” grumbles one longtime FBI agent. “Find a link, any link, no matter how vague or unproven, and then use that link to justify action against Iraq.”
While Hussein and Iraq have been linked to various terrorist groups in the past, U.S. intelligence agencies have not been able to establish a provable link with bin Laden’s al Qaeda forces.
“There may be one,” says another FBI source. “There should be one. All logic says there has to be one, but we haven’t established it as a fact. Not yet.”
Pentagon planners privately refer to the pending Iraq conflict as a “Bush league war,” something that may be fought more for political gain than anything else.
“During Desert Storm, the line officers wanted to finish the job, wanted to march into Iraq and take out Hussein and his government, but President Bush and JOC Chairman (Colin) Powell pulled the plug on the operation,” says one Pentagon officer. “We had our chance. We had the justification. We had the support. We don’t have it now.”
Some Pentagon staffers point to last weekend’s antiwar rally in Washington, where they say the crowd included many veterans of Desert Storm.
“This wasn’t just a bunch of tree huggers and longhairs marching,” says Arnold Giftos of Huntington, West Virginia, who served in Desert Storm and who came to march. “Go to any meeting of veterans groups in this country and you will see serious discussion on whether or not we should be getting into this war.”
Reporters covering the marches on Saturday and Sunday say they counted about 500 marchers among the 30,000 who carried signs or other items identifying themselves as veterans.
“I served in Vietnam,” said Robert Brighton of Detroit, who marched in Washington. “I supported Desert Storm. I don’t support this. It’s madness.”
In addition, Capitol Hill Blue has learned that both House Speaker Dennis J. Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist have told the White House that they have “increasing” numbers of Republicans in both Houses raising doubts about the war.
“Nobody in the party wants to come out publicly and tell the President he’s wrong,” says one Hill source close to the GOP leadership, “but we don’t have the kind of unity we need on this thing. It could blow apart on us at any time.”
Public support for a war with Iraq is also slipping. In November of 2001, just two months after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, 78 percent of Americans favored military action against Iraq. That support has slipped to as low as 52 percent in January polls. A Washington Post-ABC news poll taken last week shows Americans evenly split over Bush's handling of the crisis with Iraq.
Spokesmen for the White House, Pentagon and Congressional leadership offices would not comment on the record for this report. | | | | Guest-22bu | | Posted: Fri Jan 24, 2003 6:22 am Post subject: |
| Powell turns hawkish on Iraq war
Administration’s
internal debate appears over
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, right, and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw face reporters on Thursday at the State Department in Washington, D.C., Thursday.
By Glenn Kessler
THE WASHINGTON POST
Jan. 24 — Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, long perceived as the Bush administration’s most prominent moderate on Iraq, has turned hawkish in the past week.
POWELL’S SHIFT, apparent in public statements and in private conversations with his aides, stems from his dismay at the French decision to publicly oppose military action and President Bush’s growing belief that neither inspectors nor Saddam Hussein appear capable of disarming Iraq.
Within the administration, Powell was the leading advocate for bringing the issue to the United Nations to build an international consensus and test Hussein’s willingness to reach a peaceful resolution. But he has told aides in recent days that he would support military action even without a formal U.N. resolution.
The result is that the once-bitter debates over Iraq among Bush’s senior foreign policy advisers have melded “into a pretty solid consensus now, more so than any other issue,” a senior State Department official said. “The president is ironclad in his determination that this particular regime will be disarmed of weapons of mass destruction,” and he has lost patience with both the U.N. weapons inspectors and Hussein.
Powell, a retired four-star general, has long kept up a careful balancing act on Iraq. Reflecting his years of experience in the military and in Washington, he has argued strenuously in internal debates that Washington must be seen as going the extra mile to avoid war. But he has also saluted smartly whenever the president resolves the debate and makes a decision, which is why he has managed to preserve his influence in an administration stocked with forceful advocates for confronting Iraq.
Powell may feel “we’re going down this road and he wants to keep steering this train,” said retired Marine Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, a Powell friend and onetime unpaid State Department Middle East envoy. “The way to do that is not to be off to one side, but to be out front.”
It is in the interest of the administration, when it is under assault from such important allies as France, to present a picture of unity within the administration, and rarely is the full picture of the administration’s internal debates clear to outsiders; also, it may be in the administration’s interest to make Iraq believe that war is imminent.
But Powell signals his intentions very clearly in his public statements, and a striking shift in his thinking has become apparent this month.
In an interview in his State Department offices two weeks ago, Powell suggested that the inspections regime was in its infancy. “The inspectors are really now starting to gain momentum,” in part because the United States had just begun providing intelligence, he said. He noted that a report from U.N. weapons inspectors due next Monday was not a final document, but only “the first formal, official report.”
But this week, Powell flatly said: “The question isn’t how much longer do you need for inspections to work. Inspections will not work.”
In the interview two weeks ago, Powell proudly noted the “defining conversation” he had with Bush on Aug. 5, when he urged the president to make an effort to win U.N. support for a confrontation with Iraq. “He always had in his mind that it was preferable to multilateralize this,” Powell said.
‘A DRAMATIC CHANGE’
Yesterday, with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw at his side, Powell said it was “an open question right now” whether the United States would even seek a U.N. resolution authorizing military force. He said the administration believes it has sufficient authority under earlier resolutions, adding that even without U.N. backing, “I’m quite confident if it comes to that we’ll be joined by many nations.”
Jessica Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Powell’s assertion that inspections will not work was “a dramatic change.”
She said the remarks “are the closest thing I have seen over all these months to the administration giving up on inspections.” Vice President Cheney was skeptical of inspections in a speech in August, but since then, U.S. officials have emphasized that Iraq could be disarmed through rigorous inspections. “If we are now walking away from that policy, that is very significant,” she said.
Lehigh University professor Henri J. Barkey agreed that Powell’s hawkish tone marked a turn in administration policy. “It’s an important message to the Europeans and countries in the region that now we are really serious,” Barkey said. “That was the last hope of the Europeans in the U.N. process, that Powell would convince the president to give more time to the inspectors. What Powell did was close that option.”
State Department officials said the environment has changed dramatically this month. Hussein, in Powell’s eyes, has repeatedly passed up opportunities to demonstrate that the Iraqi regime will cooperate with the inspections, by taking such actions as thwarting overflights and making it difficult to have productive interviews with scientists. “Hussein has not warmed up to the [inspection] process for 12 years,” one official said. “It’s pie in the sky to think he’ll have a change of heart now.” | | | | Guest-c651 | | | | Guest-400c | | | | Guest-400c | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
