Swing voters, politicians: 'Dubya duped us'
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Independent voters and members of Congress continued to raise doubts about President George W Bush's war on Iraq on Tuesday.
In a poll released by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), swing voters - people who consider themselves independent of both major political parties and very likely to vote in next year's elections - were considerably more critical of Bush's handling of Iraq and wider foreign policy than the general public and more likely to say the president deliberately misled the public about the reasons for the war.
Members of Congress - including some from the president's own Republican Party - continued sharp attacks against the administration for misleading the public, classifying portions of a Congressional report on intelligence failures leading up to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and failing to disclose its own estimates about the costs of the occupation of Iraq, which began in April after a three-week US-led attack.
The poll, overseen by PIPA and carried out by California-based Knowledge Networks, found that an absolute majority of independents believed that both Bush and his administration were misleading when they "presented evidence to justify going to war with Iraq".
By contrast, 42 percent among the general public said the administration was misleading, while only 36 percent of them said Bush himself misled on the justifications for war.
A similar majority of swing voters (52 percent) said that "the fact that the president presented information that was in fact false" lowered their confidence in the president some (34 percent) or a lot (18 percent). Only 40 percent of the general public, by contrast, said their confidence in Bush had been shaken some or a lot, found the poll, conducted July 11-20.
The new study comes amid growing concern over the rising costs - in both US money and the lives of its soldiers - of the occupation of Iraq. Eleven US servicemen have been killed in just the past five days - since Saddam Hussein's two sons were killed - bringing the total number of US soldiers to die in combat since Bush declared an end to major military operations May 1 to 50, and 163 killed since the war began, 16 more than in the 1991 Gulf War.
A new CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released on Tuesday found continued general support for the US effort in Iraq. Thirty-seven percent of respondents said the United States should remain in Iraq, regardless of the toll on US troops. Twenty-six percent said the country's forces should withdraw from Iraq now and 33 percent that Washington should withdraw "if the number of US troops killed becomes too high". Twelve percent defined "too high" as 200, while another 10 percent defined it as 500.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, a key architect of the Iraq war, found himself almost continuously on the defensive during a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday. Both Democrats and Republicans questioned his assessment of the situation in Iraq, with several lawmakers pointedly raising questions about his judgment and credibility.
Noting that Wolfowitz had championed overthrowing the Saddam Hussein regime in Baghdad long before September 11, Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee said he "really resent[ed]" Wolfowitz's insistence that the terrorist attacks persuaded him of the necessity for going to war. "That's just not true," Chafee said. "You've been advocating for regime change all through the late 90s."
Democratic Senator Russell Feingold also took Wolfowitz to task over his testimony that "the battle to secure the peace in Iraq is now the central battle in the global war on terror". Noting that the administration's pre-war assertions of a link between Hussein and al-Qaeda were based on what Wolfowitz admitted last weekend was "murky intelligence" and have not been substantiated, Feingold said it '"sounds as if we basically walked through the looking glass here".
Almost all of the questioners, including the Republican chairman of the Committee, Senator Richard Lugar, also argued that the administration was not doing enough to persuade other countries to share the peacekeeping and financial burden now being borne almost exclusively by Washington in post-war Iraq, even at the cost of giving up some control.
Both the costs of the occupation and the administration's credibility were what were fueling dissatisfaction with the administration among swing voters, according to the PIPA report.
The credibility findings were particularly remarkable. Swing voters were found to be far more likely than members of the general public (42 versus 27 percent) to say that when Bush presented evidence that Iraq sought to buy uranium in Africa, he was knowingly presenting false evidence.
Independents also considered the process of rebuilding Iraq to be going more poorly than the general public. Seventy-two percent of independents said the operation was not going very well (49 percent) or not at all well (23 percent), compared to 57 percent of the general public.
Nonetheless, swing voters were generally more determined to see through the US mission. While 72 percent of the general public said Washington had a "responsibility to remain in Iraq as long as necessary until there is a stable government", 82 percent of independents espoused that position.
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