In past months, President Bush has repeatedly touted the “good news” whenever the Iraqi people displayed their purple fingers with big smiles and exercised their right to vote. Bush argued that we should trust in the voice of the Iraqi people.
As far as I know, Mr. Bush hasn’t acknowledged this recent unofficial vote by the Iraqis:
About six in 10 Iraqis say they approve of attacks on U.S.-led forces, and slightly more than that want their government to ask U.S. troops to leave within a year, a poll finds.
This poll was conducted by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes and it involved interviews with 1,150 Iraqi people.
This same poll also found that almost four in five Iraqis say the U.S. military presence “provokes more violence than it prevents.”
A word of caution: I would be wary of any poll in Iraq that included just 1150 people, because, with the widespread violence there, it is probably not possible to take a truly random sampling of people. Are these 1150 people all in Baghdad, for example? Or, worse, are they all inside the Green Zone, where the pollsters probably tend to spend most of their time? Did the pollsters venture far up north to include the Kurds? Maybe I'm wrong, but polling in Iraq is probably not as simple as calling random numbers in a phone book.
That said, if we assume this poll covers roughly the same population that previous polls covered, then we might still consider the *relative change* in opinion important, even if the absolute numbers might not be representative of the overall population. Clearly, Iraq is a mess, so a change in opinion toward more blaming of the Americans and an increasing desire for them to depart is not hard to believe.
There's more in the article I cited in the post. The State Department recently conducted its own poll. That poll found "two-thirds of Iraqis in Baghdad favor an immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces."
As to the poll cited in the post, see here for the details and the methodology.
The article also quote the Iraqi president as saying that the U.S. troops will remain until the Iraqi forces are "capable of putting an end to terrorism and maintaining stability and security." Given President Bush's (non)definition of the "war on terror" this quote by the Iraqi president is proof that Mr. Bush has no intentions of ever leaving Iraq, at least until the oil runs out.