Washington – A majority of Americans – 60 percent – oppose President Bush’s decision to send more troops to Iraq, and 51 percent of the country wants Congress to block the deployment, a Los Angeles Times/ Bloomberg poll has found.
As he seeks to chart a new course in Iraq, Bush also faces pervasive resistance and skepticism toward the U.S. commitment – more than three-fifths of those surveyed said the war was not worth fighting, and only 33 percent approved of his handling of the conflict.
Fifty percent said they believed Bush deliberately misled the U.S. in making his case for invading Iraq. On all three questions, these are Bush’s weakest showing to date in a Times poll.
Asked about Bush’s recent announcement that he would dispatch another 21,500 troops to Iraq, 60 percent said they opposed the move, while slightly more than one-third backed it.
About one-fourth of Republicans said they do not believe the war was worth fighting, and a roughly equal number opposed the troop increase.
“I want us to leave,” said poll respondent Beth Anderson, a Republican from Belle Center, Ohio, who has a son in the Army. Anderson, an X-ray technician, added: “I think I was one of the biggest, ‘Yes, we need to go over there.’ … And then, little by little, it just got to be too long and too much and the cost is, wow, awful.”
The poll surveyed 1,344 adults nationwide by phone Saturday through Tuesday. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Dale Sibley, a salesman in Clinton, Miss., typified those who backed Bush’s decision to send more troops. The deployment might create greater stability in Iraq and let the U.S. bring home its forces faster, said Sibley, a Republican. “I think (U.S. troops) have got to get the job done a little better before they can turn it over to the Iraqis,” he said.
