By Jim Lobe
OneWorldNovember 14, 2003
President George W. Bush 's credibility has suffered a notable decline as a result of the Iraq war and its aftermath, according to a new poll released Thursday by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA). The percentage of people who now believe that Bush and his administration were presenting evidence they knew to be false to justify the decision to go to war last March has doubled from ten percent five months ago to 21 percent in the new PIPA polls, which conducted its survey of more than 1,000 adults contacted at random from October 31 through November 10. Moreover, there was an 11 percent rise in the percentage of respondents who say Bush's performance on Iraq would make them less likely to vote for him in next year's presidential elections--from 31 percent in September to 42 percent--according to PIPA director, Steve Kull. "For the first time, the president's handling of Iraq has shifted from a net positive to a net negative for his electoral prospects," Kull told reporters Thursday.
The poll, the latest in a series that has tried to assess in depth the evolution of U.S. public's foreign-policy attitudes, suggests that the public remains highly conflicted about the Iraq war. While a clear majority believe that the administration took the country to war on incorrect assumptions based on faulty--or little or no--actual evidence, a plurality still believe that it was the best thing Washington could do, and an overwhelming majority of 77 percent believe Washington now has the responsibility to remain in Iraq until a stable government can be put in place. "The majority's views about the decision to go to war are nuanced," Kull said. "It believes there were legitimate concerns that prompted the decision, while at the same time it believes the threat was not imminent and the decision was taken precipitously, without proper international support." In many ways, the public has now returned to its pre-war skepticism about going to war in the first place. Until the eve of the March 20 invasion, majorities of the public consistently favored giving more time to UN arms inspectors to find whether ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and to the effort to marshal more support from U.S. allies, according to numerous polls. Once the war was launched, however, strong majorities rallied behind the decision to go to war and told pollsters that Bush had waited long enough for a diplomatic solution.
Some 61 percent of respondents in the latest PIPA poll now say that the U.S. should have taken more time to find out about Iraq's alleged WMD program, and 59 percent say it should have taken more time to build international backing. The poll also found that a majority of Americans now believe that the evidence that the U.S. had on Iraq did not meet appropriate international standards for going to war without the approval of the UN Security Council. While most Americans believe that countries have the right to go to war if they have evidence they are in imminent danger of being attacked with WMD, less than one-third (32 percent) also believe that the U.S. had such evidence or, based on what is now known, that Iraq in fact posed such a threat (35 percent). And, while 53 percent said they believed the U.S. had evidence that Iraq was acquiring WMD that could be used against it at some point in the future, only 31 percent said such evidence would justify war. An overwhelming 87 percent of the public said they believe that the administration portrayed Iraq as an imminent threat to the United States before the war. While 42 percent believe that the administration was justified in that depiction, 58 percent said they now believe the administration did not have the evidence to sustain it. On the specific question of the administration's claims about Iraq's alleged WMD programs, a total of 72 percent (up from 63 percent in July) said the administration did not have the evidence to support such claims, with 21 percent saying the administration knew that the evidence it was presenting was false and 51 percent saying that the administration was ''stretching the truth." Significantly, a large number of those polled believe that Bush was determined to go to war regardless of the actual evidence. Sixty-three percent said the president would have attacked Iraq if U.S. intelligence agencies had told him there was no reliable evidence that Iraq possessed or was building WMD or was providing substantial support to al Qaeda, according to the poll.
These figures help explain the decline in Bush's credibility with the public. Only 42 percent said that the president is honest and frank in his public statements, while 56 percent said they have doubts about what he says. The decline in Bush's credibility on Iraq, coupled with the difficulties U.S. forces have encountered in the post-war occupation, are likely to be the main reasons why the percentage of people who say they are less likely to vote for Bush next year has increased so sharply over the past two months. This could be very significant in next year's election, according to Kull. Perceptions of honesty are a powerful predictor of voting behavior, even more powerful than party identification, he said. "Those who said the president is honest and frank are 11 times more likely to say that they plan to vote for him than people who have doubts about the things he says." Bush's more recent efforts to justify the war by citing Hussein's human rights record may also not be as compelling as the administration might wish. Only 27 percent of respondents said they think that countries have the right, without UN approval, to overthrow another government that is committing "substantial violations of its citizens' human rights," although another 41 percent said that intervention could be justified if the violations were "large-scale, extreme and equivalent to genocide."
In the case of Iraq, however, only 32 percent of respondents believed both that human rights abuses equivalent to genocide justified intervention and that such extreme violations were occurring under Hussein's rule. Asked, "Do you think that there are other governments existing today that have human rights records as bad as that of Iraq under Saddam Hussein?" an overwhelming 88 percent said there are. Despite these findings, only 38 percent of those polled believe that going to war was the wrong thing to do, while 42 percent said it was the best thing to do under the circumstances, and an additional 15 percent said they supported the war in order to support the president, although they were not convinced that war was the best option. Supporting these judgments was the belief that while Iraq might not have posed an imminent threat on the order depicted by the administration, most of the public believed it had a WMD program (71 percent) and was providing support to al Qaeda (67 percent), despite the lack of evidence to support these beliefs.
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