I’ve noticed that we’re again hearing a lot of talk to the effect that the American people just don’t have the gumption to brave out the genius of President Bush’s Iraq policy. Or, relatedly, that if we’d had constant polls back in WWII that they too would have shown public support flagging at every little reverse between December 1941 and August of 1945.
Well, this topic came up in a rather heated exchange with a reader. So I thought the point was worth making again. Despite what a lot of people in Washington and the rest of the media seem to think, there was actually fairly extensive polling of public opinion during the Second World War.
And here’s an example of some of it. (Regular readers may recognize this because I posted the same data in 2006.)
Click here or on the image itself to see a full-size copy of the data in question.
The key point is that many polls were taken during the war. And approval of the president’s conduct of the war, understanding and belief in the goals of the war and other similar measurements all remained constant at very high levels or in some cases actually went up. One key data point you can see on the chart is the number of Americans will to make peace with Hitler — that is, an negotiated end to the war rather than the unconditional surrender which was a key allied war demand. The number was under 10% for most of 1942 and 1943. Then it briefly surged up to just over 20% in early 1944 (roughly the time of the invasion of Italy) before falling back down to about 15% for duration of the war in Europe.
Given the flimsiness of the rationale and the incompetence of the execution of the war in Iraq, a more perplexing question is why support for the war held on as long as it did. But the reason for the drop is not the time the war has dragged on — though it’s now as long or longer than almost any other war in US history — or how many have been killed. The death toll in the Second World War dwarfs the numbers of those killed in Iraq.
The reason the war is unpopular is because people don’t think we are accomplishing anything that promotes our security or national interests — indeed, quite the contrary. Not because we’re not doing it right or not doing it well but because the whole concept is flawed. People can see that we’re digging a hole into the Earth and a lot of them want to stop and climb out even though it will be messy.
