Out of Iraq: Not Whether, but When and How

The renewed tussle between Congress and the president on Iraq is sure to be reinforced by partisan characterizations of public attitudes on withdrawal. Beware oversimplification: While views on the war itself are broadly and steadily negative, opinions on pulling out are a bit more complex.

While most Americans favor eventual withdrawal, many fewer favor the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. forces – with substantial variation, seemingly depending on how the question is asked. Similarly, support for setting a deadline for withdrawal has varied with question wording.

It’s less common than you might think for differently but neutrally worded questions on the same subject to impact poll results; it tends to happen especially when opinion on an issue is conflicted. That’s clearly the case in Iraq, where the public’s war fatigue long has been countered by a sense of responsibility not to leave the country in chaos.

A Rubicon in these views seems to have been crossed at the beginning of this year, when, for the first time in ABC/Post polls dating to summer 2003, the majority shifted to favoring withdrawal from Iraq (timing unspecified) "even if that means civil order is not restored there." That shift’s also implicit in blame for the continued violence in Iraq, which Americans overwhelmingly place on the Iraqi government, not the United States.

But when and how U.S. withdrawal should happen is another question. In a CBS News poll late last month, 63 percent favored setting a timetable to withdraw U.S. forces, about the same as it’s been since late April. That’s sensible for a war that more than six in 10 Americans, in ABC/Post data, call "not worth fighting."

But our own polling has found that when withdrawal (for war opponents, a built-in positive attribute) is balanced by counterargument (that setting a deadline would encourage the insurgents), support for a timetable has been lower – 51 percent when we asked it this in April.

Still, that was in April, and while CBS’ result on a timetable has been stable, they’ve had a bit of an increase in the number of Americans saying the United States should "remove all its troops from Iraq" – 40 percent, up from 33 percent. CNN had about the same result a few weeks ago.

Both the CBS and CNN questions characterize the options as something the United States should "do now," but in a way that’s less explicit than asking if the United States should immediately withdraw all U.S. forces from Iraq. And their questions give two options for reducing U.S. forces (decrease the number, or withdraw all), vs. one option to increase the deployment, and another to keep it the same.

Our ABC/Post question instead asks if the troop level should be increased, decreased, or remain the same. People who favor a decrease then are asked if it should be a complete and immediate withdrawal, or not. That approach, in early June, found 55 percent support for a decrease, but just 15 percent support for a complete, immediate withdrawal – both essentially the same since spring last year.

There are, of course, deep partisan differences; in our April poll, for instance, 73 percent of Democrats favored a deadline for withdrawal, vs. 23 percent of Republicans.

The fundamental point is that, steadily for the last two and a half years, most Americans have said the war was not worth fighting – a sentiment that’s shredded the president’s popularity, overthrown Republican control of Congress and put the country generally into a blue funk. The question both Congress and most Americans are grappling with now is the same: Not whether to end the U.S. combat role in Iraq, but when and how.