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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (10825)	5/15/2004 4:37:45 PM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 20773

Support for Bush plummets over Iraq By James Harding in Washington (FT) Published: May 14 2004 21:54 \| Last Updated: May 14 2004 21:54 Public support for President George W. Bush's handling of the war in Iraq has plunged to only 36 per cent and his approval rating has fallen to the lowest level of his presidency, according to a Zogby poll due out on Sunday. Confronted with a rising US body count and images of torture in Abu Ghraib prison, Americans have begun to countenance failure in Iraq. The majority of people polled now do not think it was worth going to war. The shift in the national mood bodes ill for Mr Bush's hopes of a second term and has bolstered the campaign of John Kerry, his Democrat challenger. The poll will show 42 per cent of people approve of Mr Bush's overall performance. Almost two-thirds are critical of his handling of Iraq, according to John Zogby, the pollster. In an American Research Group poll, Mr Kerry moved ahead of Mr Bush in the swing state of Ohio, standing at 50 per cent compared with 43 per cent for the president. Most alarming to the strategists running Mr Bush's campaign is that 54 per cent of the 1,000-plus likely voters surveyed by Zogby this week said they thought the country was heading in the wrong direction. Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster and political strategist, said public opinion was moving against the war: "The photographs projected everything the public thinks is wrong about the war and drowned out everything the public thinks is right . . .[The president] has to be concerned." John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University, says the situation in the US is now "fairly comparable . . . to late '67, early '68 when there was a really substantial decline of support". Mr Mueller said that much as public backing for the Vietnam war never returned to 50 per cent-plus levels after 1968, so "it is hard to imagine much of a recovery now. As American casualties continue to come in, the support will continue to erode." In response to the change of mood, the administration's rhetoric advocating the building of a "beacon of liberty" in Iraq has been shored up by language warning of the catastrophe of withdrawal. As Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, left for Europe to seek support for further troop commitments to the US-led coalition in Iraq, she said: "I would ask people to remember what it was like in World War II. We lost many, many people. Nobody abandoned the countries of Europe because it got tough, because it got hard." Yet some senior US military officials have begun to express fears that the US will run out of political will before the mission in Iraq is complete.