WASHINGTON — Families with ties to the military, long a reliable source of support for wartime presidents, disapprove of President Bush and his handling of the war in Iraq, with a majority concluding the invasion was not worth it, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found.
Nearly six out of every 10 military families disapprove of Bush’s job performance and the way he has run the war, rating him only slightly better than does the general population.
And among those families with soldiers, sailors and Marines who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan, 60 percent say that the war in Iraq was not worth the cost, the same result as all adults surveyed.
“I pray to God that they did not die in vain, but I don’t think our president is even sensitive at all to what it’s like to have a child serving over there,” said poll respondent Sue Datta, 61, whose youngest son, an Army staff sergeant, was seriously wounded in Iraq last year and is scheduled to redeploy in 2009.
Patience with the war, which has lasted longer than the U.S. involvement in World War II, is wearing thin — particularly among families who have sent a service member to Iraq or Afghanistan. One-quarter say American troops should stay “as long as it takes to win.” But nearly seven in 10 favor a withdrawal within the coming year or “right away.”
Military families in general are only slightly more patient: 35 percent are willing to stay until victory; 58 percent want them home within a year or sooner.
That’s in sync with the general population, 64 percent of whom call for a withdrawal by the end of next year.
The survey of 1,467 adults was done nationwide from Nov. 30 through Monday. It included 631 respondents from military families and 152 who have had someone in their family stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan.
The margin of error for the entire sample is 3 percentage points, for military families it is 4 points and for families with someone in the war zone it is 8 points.
