Poll, Poll, Everywhere a Poll (The Hidden Kristof)

Despite upbeat assessments from BushCo, the boots on the ground can see the forest (and the IEDs) for the trees. Nicholas Kristoff points to a new poll that shows disintegrating support for the Iraq war within the armed services in his Tuesday column, The Soldiers Speak. Will the President Listen? (full column available to Times Select subscribers):

The poll is the first of U.S. troops currently serving in Iraq, according to John Zogby, the pollster. Conducted by Zogby International and LeMoyne College, it asked 944 service members, "How long should U.S. troops stay in Iraq?"

Only 23 percent backed Mr. Bush's position that they should stay as long as necessary. In contrast, 72 percent said that U.S. troops should be pulled out within one year. Of those, 29 percent said they should withdraw "immediately."

That's one more bit of evidence that our grim stay-the-course policy in Iraq has failed. Even the American troops on the ground don't buy into it — and having administration officials pontificate from the safety of Washington about the need for ordinary soldiers to stay the course further erodes military morale.

While the White House emphasizes the threat from non-Iraqi terrorists, only 26 percent of the U.S. troops say that the insurgency would end if those foreign fighters could be kept out. A plurality believes that the insurgency is made up overwhelmingly of discontented Iraqi Sunnis.

So what would it take to win in Iraq? Maybe that was the single most depressing finding in this poll.

By a two-to-one ratio, the troops said that "to control the insurgency we need to double the level of ground troops and bombing missions." And since there is zero chance of that happening, a majority of troops seemed to be saying that they believe this war to be unwinnable.

This first systematic look at the views of the U.S. troops on the ground suggests that our present strategy in Iraq is failing badly. The troops overwhelmingly don't want to "stay the course," and they don't seem to think the American strategy can succeed.

The BBC has also conducted a global poll (conducted by Globscan and the Programme On International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, or Pipa) on the question of whether the BushCo administration is winning the "global war on terror"--and the results aren't going Washington's way.

"Though the Bush administration has framed the intervention in Iraq as a means of fighting terrorism, all around the world - including in the US - most people view it as having increased the likelihood of terrorist attacks," Pipa director Steven Kull notes.

"The near-unanimity of this assessment among countries is remarkable in global public opinion polling."

The poll also indicates that there is a strong body of opinion in 20 of the 35 countries surveyed that believes US-led forces should withdraw from Iraq in the next few months.

Check out the BBC story for more charts and graphs, including opinion charts from individual countries. So, what does Kristof posit as a solution to all this?

[W]hile we shouldn't rush for the exits immediately, we should lay out a timetable for withdrawal that would remove all troops by the end of next year. And we should state clearly that we will not keep any military bases in Iraq — that's a no-brainer, for it costs us nothing, but our hedging on bases antagonizes Iraqi nationalists and results in more dead Americans.

Such a timetable would force Iraqis to prepare — politically and militarily — to run their own country. The year or two of transition would galvanize Iraqi Shiites to find a modus vivendi with Sunnis while undermining the insurgents' arguments that they are nationalists protecting the motherland from Yankee crusaders.

True, a timetable is arbitrary and risky, for it could just encourage insurgents to hang tight for another couple of years. But we're being killed — literally — because of nationalist suspicions among Iraqis that we're just after their oil and bases and that we're going to stay forever. It's crucial that we defuse that nationalist rage.

[UPDATE] Another facet to the CBS poll and a corallary to the above noted Zogby poll from Kristof's column is the 30 percent approval of President Bush's handling of the war in Iraq--an all time low (hat tip to ThinkProgress). Also, just 29%, the lowest since the spring of 2004, say the results of the war in Iraq have been worth the cost. (For more drill-down polling information, download the PDF from CBS.)