WASHINGTON – Nine months of chaos and casualties in Iraq since Saddam Hussein’s capture have taken a heavy toll on American opinion of President Bush’s decision to go to war.
In December, when Hussein was caught, public support for Bush’s decision to go to war was 2-to-1 in favor. Now the public is evenly divided on whether the war was the right thing to do or whether it was a mistake.
Older people, minorities, people with lower incomes, residents of the Northeast and Catholics are among those increasingly skeptical of the war effort, according to Associated Press polling.
These shifts in public sentiment reflect the difficulties in Iraq – including a death toll nearing 1,000 U.S. soldiers, the violent insurgency against the new Iraqi government and U.S. forces, and the failure to find banned weapons, which was among the central justifications for Bush’s decision to go to war.
“It was a mistake,” said 73-year-old Mil Jenkinson, a retired schoolteacher and a Democrat from Dickinson, N.D. “There were no weapons of mass destruction. I keep thinking it’s not our place to rule the world. Everyone does not think our way of life is the right way.
“It’s arrogant of us to go into a country and tell them what kind of government to have.”
Those most likely to say the Iraq war was the right thing to do were Republicans, Southerners, those who earn more than $50,000 a year and young adults.
“Iraq was getting out of hand,” said Kim Rivers, a 35-year-old Republican who works as a teacher’s aide in Champlain, N.Y. “It should have been done a long time ago.”
Yet among many different groups of Americans, a majority of people now say the war was a mistake. Those groups include minorities (65 percent), Northeasterners (60 percent), Democrats (80 percent), people who make less than $25,000 a year (57 percent) and Catholics (51 percent).
The most recent AP-Ipsos poll of 1,001 adults has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, larger for subgroups such as older Americans.
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