A NEW POLL OF IRAQIS

To my knowledge, there have been two previous polls of Iraqis sentiment about coalition forces that have made the news. The earliest one was reported on last June and was described as having been done recently. It found that nearly 45% of Iraqis felt attacks on coalition troops were justified. The other one made the news last October and was sponsored by the British Ministry of Defence. It was carried out last August and found that 45% of Iraqis supported attacks on coalition forces.

The newest poll was done early this January:

Nearly half of Iraqis support attacks on U.S. troops, poll finds
By Drew Brown
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Posted on Mon, Jan. 30, 2006

WASHINGTON - A new poll found that nearly half of Iraqis approve of attacks on U.S.-led forces, and most favor setting a timetable for American troops to leave. The poll was to be published Tuesday by WorldPublicOpinion.org, a Web site that reports on public opinion from around the globe. The survey was conducted Jan. 2-5, with a nationwide sample of 1,150 Iraqis from country's main religious and ethnic sects.

According to the poll's findings, 47 percent of Iraqis approve of attacks on American forces, but there were large differences among ethnic and religious groups. Among Sunni Muslims, 88 percent said they approved of the attacks. That approval was found among 41 percent of Shiite Muslims and 16 percent of Kurds.

"They're pretty much the same results that have been going on since 2003, so it's consistent with a lot of the attitudes that exist," said Anthony H. Cordesman, a former Pentagon official and a longtime Iraq watcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a center for national-security studies in Washington. Previous samples from Shiites who supported attacks on coalition troops have been much lower in the past, Cordesman said, but support for U.S.-led forces even among Shiites - who were oppressed under Saddam Hussein, a Sunni - has been mixed from the beginning.




Despite all the propaganda from Fredo and his enablers, we have not in fact won over the "hearts and minds" of the Iraqis people.