Newsweek Poll: Drop in Approval for Bush on Iraq
Sat July 12, 2003 03:14 PM ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Public opinion of President Bush's handling of Iraq has dropped about 20 points since U.S. forces took Baghdad in April, a Newsweek poll said on Saturday.
Bush's approval rating for his handling of the military operation in Iraq fell to 53 percent among those surveyed on July 10-11, from 65 percent in a May 29-30 poll, and a high of 74 percent in an April 10-11 poll taken just after Saddam Hussein was ousted from power in Iraq, Newsweek said.
The president's overall rating slipped to 55 percent from 61 percent in the May poll.
More than half of those polled, 53 percent, said the Bush administration did not purposely mislead the public about evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in order to build support for the war, while 38 percent said the administration had misled the public.
And in an indication of how the controversy over an incorrect assertion by Bush in his January State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium from Africa was playing to the public, 72 percent said they had not heard about it.http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=3079140:crazy: :silly: