Iraq War polling numbers are approaching Vietnam War polling numbers

[Mattforclark]

Compare:

http://www.pollingreport.com/vietnam.htm

and

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/12/opinion/polls/main617087.shtml

The Vietnam poll was taken in 2000.




29% now say that the Iraq war was "worth it"

Yet 49% still think that the Iraq war was the "right thing" to do. I would suggest that there is a serious disconnect between these two. As events continue to unfold, surely these two numbers must come closer together.

Compare this to the Vietnam polling numbers:

24% think we did the right thing getting involved in Vietnam, while 60% think we should have stayed out in Vietnam. Yet 37% still call the Vietnam war "a noble cause."

It seems that the disconnect between it being the something like "the right thing" and it being "worth it" is a bit harder. I would guess that it is probably a psychological thing - our troops, in combat, they must be doing the right thing.

But the 24% who think we did the right thing getting into Vietnam must represent some sort of bottom - those people who favor things like nuclear strikes on anyone who is a foreigner, and who think that bodycounts are really cool. When you compare the 24% who say that Vietnam was "worth it" to the 29% who say that Iraq was worth it, you have to conclude that pretty much the only people who still support the Iraq invasion - in retrospect - are those who will support absolutely anything that is a war, and results in death.

The difference in the 49% who say Iraq was "the right thing" and the 37% who call the Vietnam war is probably a mixture of two elements. 1) We still have soldiers in combat in Vietnam, and 2) the wording - calling war a "noble cause" is stronger than saying that it's "the right thing." So it is possible that the "right thing" number may not go down much - it actually went up 2 points since last week. That is because it is pretty close to rock bottom of what you are possibly going to get for that answer while we have soldiers in combat.

[Mattforclark]

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