In the latest USA Today/Gallup Poll, taken Aug. 3-5, the percentage of those who said the additional troops are "making the situation better" rose from only 22 percent a month ago to 31 percent.
A month ago, 51 percent said the "surge" was "not making much difference." That number fell to 41 percent.
About the same number - 24 percent then, 25 percent now - said it was making things worse.
Enter the New York Times/CBS poll taken around the same time.
It showed that support for going to war in Iraq has risen from 35 percent in May to 42 percent in July.
Those thinking it was a bad idea to go to war fell from 61 percent to 54 percent.
This is fairly significant in the poll-driven world of big-time U.S. politics.
If your a politician seeking election, you don't want to be on the wrong side of public opinion when only 35 percent of the public sees things your way and 61 percent don't.
That's why you saw so many defectors from W over the past couple of months.
But when the split is 42 to 54, you can live with that. That's close to the margin of error. You can stick with your position.
Sadly, I honestly believe that's the way many politicians stake out their positions - principles be damned.
Odd thing about the Times poll, however, is that they didn't believe it.
They didn't believe it so much that they didn't publish it right away.
Odder still is that the Times admitted they didn't believe it - in print.
Janet Elder, the Times's editor of news surveys and election analysis, said the poll was "counterintuitive" and couldn't "be easily explained."
So - in a highly unusual, albeit not unprecedented move - off the Times went a polling again.
When the second batch of numbers came in, they were virtually the same.
Elders noted there also was a 10-point drop in the number of people who said the war is going badly.
Now, is it really all that hard to believe that the war is polling better, or is the Times out of touch?
U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, along with Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, along with a chorus of others most familiar with the situation in Iraq, have been warning that if the U.S. leaves early, chaos will consume Iraq.
Crocker, commenting on a precipitous troop pullout, told Associated Press recently, "A massive human catastrophe (could follow), with the bloodshed among the Iraqi civilians on a scale we have not seen and may find hard to imagine."
Yikes.
Military leaders in Iraq have been explaining that while the troops are making headway by clearing provinces of insurgents and winning public support, they need more time to get the Iraqi security forces up to speed.
Brookings Institution scholars Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack wrote a piece in - of all places, the New York Times - under the headline "Stability in Iraq: A War We Just Might Win."
"We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily "victory" but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with."
They concluded, after an eight-day trip to Iraq:
"How much longer should American troops keep fighting and dying to build a new Iraq while Iraqi leaders fail to do their part? And how much longer can we wear down our forces in this mission? These haunting questions underscore the reality that the surge cannot go on forever. But there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008."
I might add at this point that O'Hanlon is senior fellow, Foreign Policy Studies at Brookings, and Pollack is director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy. These guys are pretty sharp. And no one would accuse the Brookings Institution of being conservative.
Check out the entire article here: www.brookings.edu/views/op-ed/ohanlon/pollack20070730.htm
If that's not enough, here are some excerpts from a recent report by AP Military Writer Robert Burns, on his 18th reporting trip to Iraq since the start of the war in 2003. He has written about U.S. military involvement in Iraq and the Middle East since the 1991 Gulf War. He knows his stuff.
"The new U.S. military strategy in Iraq, unveiled six months ago to little acclaim, is working.
"In two weeks of observing the U.S. military on the ground and interviewing commanders, strategists and intelligence officers, it's apparent that the war has entered a new phase in its fifth year...
"... Sectarian killings continue and extremist groups remain a threat, yet they are being squeezed harder. ... The troops are interacting more with the local people and are protecting them more effectively."
Burns is quick to note that daunting obstacles remain, especially with regard to the Iraqi leaderships' ability to organize and rule their country, but, he notes:
"...Despite political setbacks, American commanders are clinging to a hope that stability might be built from the bottom up - with local groups joining or aiding U.S. efforts to root out extremists - rather than from the top down, where national leaders have failed to act. Commanders are encouraged by signs that more Iraqis are growing fed up with violence.
And this:
There is clearly a consensus among senior U.S. commanders in Iraq that (the potential benefits of sticking with the war strategy outweigh the cost.) They feel that so much has been sacrificed already that it makes no sense to quit now. Lt. Gen. James Dubik, in charge of training and equipping Iraqi forces, said the counterinsurgency strategy, not fully implemented until June, has finally wrested the initiative from the insurgents.
"It was fought over and died for, and there's no reason to give it back right now," Dubik told AP.
Burns' report runs to 1,250 words. Read the whole thing here: www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8QRMCU00&show_article=1
So, in light of all the recent chatter about improvement in the situation in Iraq, I really don't see why the Times editors were so shocked to see the public a little more optimistic.
Here's how I see it.
Going into Iraq in the first place under pre-emptive, dubious pretenses? Bad idea. Conceded.
Mismanagement of the war from the outset? Not enough troops? Poor plan? No exit strategy? Bad ideas. Conceded.
But we're there now, so why not get it right for once? I think that's the prevailing sentiment. I don't think anyone wants to turn Iraq over to al-Qaida.
And I think the ardent anti-war, moveon.org, lefty, pull-the-troops-out-yesterday, candidates need to understand that. They ignore that sentiment at their own electoral and political peril.
Bottom line? Americans hate to lose - at anything.
And more than that, I think they hate to think that the lives of 3,679 troops and counting were sacrificed in vain.
