Somebody's spinning here, that's for sure. The article is not clearly written, and seems to have been a little butchered by the Guardian editors too. But if you work through the numbers, it's pretty clear that there were four choices, not three, and Bremer got 73% on the not very much / no confidence choices, 27% for quite a bit / a great deal of confidence. If you want to read "not very much confidence" as a positive vote, that's your privilege, it might or might not qualify you for a W PR job.
Here is a less butchered version of the AP story: news.com.au
A clip from that version:
Asked how much confidence they had in US and UK forces in Iraq, 56.6 per cent of respondents said they had none at all and 22.2 per cent said they didn't have very much confidence, while only 7.6 per cent had "a great deal".
Regarding the Coalition Provisional Authority, led by US administrator Paul Bremer, 43.5 per cent of those questioned expressed no confidence, and 29.9 per cent said they had not very much confidence.
Only 6.1 per cent of interviewees said they had "a great deal" of confidence in political parties, while only 16.2 said they had "quite a lot".
Of the remainder, 44.6 per cent said they had none at all. The rest had "not very much" confidence.
If you really want spin, there's this version, which presumably was approved by Cheney and the war marketeers.
Iraqi Public Opinion Poll Finds Overwhelming Support for Democratic Future voanews.com
Or maybe not totally approved, even VOA let slip this bit at the end:
But the survey discovered very little gratitude toward the U.S. and British troops who toppled Saddam Hussein. The survey concludes that occupation forces are "the most mistrusted institution in Iraq today."
Only one in five respondents said they have either a great deal, or quite a lot of confidence in the foreign troops, while Iraqi religious leaders ranked as the most trusted, with 70 percent approval. |
