Building Public Support for Withdrawal from Iraq

When thinking about building public support for withdrawal from Iraq, voters fall into three groups: 1) people who favor withdrawal, 2) people who oppose or are ambivalent about withdrawal, but have negative feelings about the war, and 3) people who oppose withdrawal, and have positive feelings about the war. Many voters think the war is going poorly or dislike the war, but aren’t convinced that withdrawal is the right solution. Consequently, we’ve seen many Democratic leaders equivocate on their opposition to the war.

Using the Pew July 2007 Political Survey data, we can view the proportion of the public that falls into each group:

One way to intensify pressure on elected officials to push for a speedy withdrawal is by increasing public support for withdrawal. We have the 54% who support withdrawal on our side, and will have the most difficult time convincing the 27% who both oppose withdrawal and believe that the war is going well (this group is mostly self-identified Republicans). So, in order to build public support for withdrawal, we need to persuade the 19% who currently oppose withdrawal but think the war is going poorly.

This approach raises a couple questions. If these 19% think the war is going poorly, which should imply that the United States isn’t currently achieving its political objectives, why don’t they want to withdraw? How can we convince this group to support withdrawal? Although we can’t use this data to determine what causes people to “move” in favor of withdrawal, here’s what I think is going on:

This group’s reluctance to support withdrawal may be because their dislike for the war is complicated by Bush’s rationales for staying in Iraq: that withdrawal would cause a civil war that would draw the entire region into conflict, and that withdrawal would make Iraq an Al Qaeda stronghold. These assumptions are often repeated uncritically in the media and are probably salient considerations for many people when they form their position on withdrawal.

Here’s each group’s responses to the question “If the U.S. withdraws its troops from Iraq over the coming year, would it INCREASE, DECREASE or have no effect on the chances that Iraq would go into a full scale civil war?”:

Here’s each group’s responses to the question “If the U.S. withdraws its troops from Iraq over the coming year, would it INCREASE, DECREASE or have no effect on the chances that al Qaeda would establish terrorist bases in Iraq?”:

(”Other” was not offered by the interviewers as a possible response for either question)

One might expect the group of 19% to be less open to these rationales, but that isn’t the case. People who oppose withdrawal overwhelmingly accept these two rationales regardless of how well they think the war is going, whereas people who support withdrawal do not. For the 19% who oppose withdrawal but think the war is going poorly, these considerations may be stronger than their negative impression of the war, which could be what caused them to articulate that they opposed withdrawal.

The problem with these rationales to oppose withdrawal is that they are wrong, and are justifications to continue a flawed foreign policy. I’ll leave it to smarter foreign policy minds to explain why responsible withdrawal from Iraq won’t further inflame Shiite-Sunni tensions or leave an Al Qaeda stronghold in the long term.

Ending the war responsibly entails challenging these false assumptions, particularly by fighting the media conventional wisdom that contributes to much of the public believing them. The Bush administration has put forward, and the media has largely accepted, a series of false choices involving worst-case scenarios when it comes to Iraq. They claimed that either we invade Iraq, or Saddam Hussein will use WMDs. Now, they assert that either we stay in Iraq, or the terrorists will come after us here. If we want to build public support for withdrawal, we need to challenge these false choice scenarios that contribute to confused feelings about Iraq.

Disclaimers about the data:

• I used the most recent Pew data available to the public on Iraq, which is from last summer. Given the recent increase in violence, public attitudes on Iraq may have changed since then.
• I included the few people who answered that they didn’t know whether they favored withdrawal in the “does not favor withdrawal” category, because withdrawal is the change in the status quo we’re interested in, whereas a lack of an opinion is not.
• The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press bears no responsibility for the analyses or interpretations of the data presented in this post.

WHAT'S NEXT?

Subscribe via RSS or Email  ::  Email This Post   ::  Leave a comment

Bookmark to: