zogby poll: 72% of US troops in iraq say they should have withdrawn in 06. what do you think?

Answer 1

im just glad they get a chance to speak their minds, for all the service they do they deserve it, and more, i respect all of their opinions, they know it firsthand

Answer 2

Well is that surprising? It reports that 75% are on their third deployment. Don't forget a large number of them are reservists and National Guard. Prolonged deployment is rough on those guys. However, now that I have actually read the article by Zogby I also notice that 53% said that America should double the number of troops and double the bombing missions.

Sure they think we should be pulling out in a year's time but with victory in hand!

.

Answer 3

Yeah I am not big on polls. most of the time they give a general postion of the majority.

But if your poll taker is biased he can make the poll read whatever he wants.

I am SURE 72% of US troops do not say that we should withdraw from Iraq. I have 5 former and current military in my family. Everyone of us knows that if we withdrawl right now Iran, Turkey, and Al Queda will crush Iraq under thier thumbs.

So there is 100% say we should not leave Iraq right now.

But that poll is also skewed.

Sangria; You are playing into the liberals hands. They want nothing less than defeat in Iraq and want to appease the terrorist. They will bow on a prayer rug if the have to and offer their first daughter as an honor killing if there country doesn't have to go to war.

Answer 4

AMERICA: LISTEN TO YOUR MEN AND WOMEN ON THE GROUND. This is EXACTLY what happened in Vietnam and yet we haven't learned a damn thing.

http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1075

"An overwhelming majority of 72% of American troops serving in Iraq think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year, and more than one in four say the troops should leave immediately, a new Le Moyne College/Zogby International survey shows."

Here's a revealing tidbit: "Almost 90% think war is retaliation for Saddam’s role in 9/11, most don’t blame Iraqi public for insurgent attacks." ...WHAT...THE...F....

***NOTE***

Just because the majority of our troops feel we should leave Iraq does NOT necessarily mean we should "cut and run" on this "War on Terror" or even mean to imply the radical Islamic threat isn't real. Seriously, folks, use your heads.

Answer 5

Next, you'll tell me there's a zogby poll suggesting the United States divide in half and meld with Mexico and Canada.

Get a clue. It will take a catastrophe beyond your imagination to get the country to agree on anything other than we dont trust politicians and lawyers, yet we elect one or the other every stinking election.

Answer 6

Well, if Hillary wants you to think that, the Zogby Pollsters are deep in her pockets, and there you go. Bingo, the poll reads what she wants you to think is true. Have you ever seen a bigger lie in the polls yet? Of course this is not true.

Answer 7

If you read into this poll it is very biased. Like any poll the answers are only as accurate as the questions that are in the poll. The biggest problem is this poll doesn't leave room for any middle ground in the questions.

Below is an article about this poll from "Real Clear Politics."

March 10, 2006
Zogby's Bogus Poll on U.S. Military in Iraq
By Tim Kane

For anyone following the Iraq war, now may be the time to take off those rose-colored glasses. According to a recent Zogby poll, 72 percent of U.S. troops say it's time to withdraw from Iraq. Another stunner is that only three in five soldiers in Iraq have a clear sense of the mission. Ouch!

Despite the wide range of opinions and loud voices about America's role in Iraq, there's a real hunger for authenticity that only the troops on the ground can provide. As a veteran, I have been hoping that a pollster would take the obvious step of asking our troops for their opinions, and I think Zogby International deserves credit for making the effort.

But as an economist, my appreciation eroded sharply when I took a closer look.

The survey contains 24 questions. It was given secretly during late January and early February to an unknown number of American troops serving in Iraq, although we are told that 944 respondents were included. If all the guidelines for random sampling were met (they weren't), the reported margin of error would be plus or minus 3.3 percent.

The unforgivable flaw in Zogby's survey is the biased phrasing of its questions and answers. Two of the most provocative results are based on questions with no middle ground. It's like a multiple-choice test with no right answers.

For example, the widespread finding that three in four soldiers think the United States should withdraw from Iraq within a year has only one option for troops who think otherwise: stay indefinitely. This infamous question asks, "How long should U.S. troops stay in Iraq?" But the first three answers are not phrased in terms of staying, they are phrased "withdraw...," "withdraw..." and "withdraw... ." Where are the options for troops who think the United States should stay for "one to two years" or "two to five years"? Zogby omits such nuance. It's stay or go. Now or never.

The smart troops who perceived this false choice probably set the clipboard down and walked away at that point. That leaves us with a biased respondent pool.

Another question asks for a description of "your understanding of the U.S. mission in Iraq." Two choices describe the mission as clear, and four choices describe it as unclear.

More damning, John Zogby himself misrepresented the phrasing of one of the questions in an op-ed. This may seem like nitpicking, but if half a man's family say they want "chicken" for dinner, and he reports those votes as "nonvegetarian," he is not exactly being honest. In just this way, the poll asked the soldiers to rate seven different "reasons for the Iraq invasion." It is a question about prewar justification, not the postwar occupation. Yet Zogby described their answers as a description of "the U.S. mission." If that's the question he wanted to ask, he should have asked it that way. Polling is a science. Words matter.

The biggest question we should all be asking Zogby is not about the questions that were included, but about those that weren't. Nowhere in the survey results do we see assessments of the U.S. mission. Has it been a success or a failure? How so? Nowhere do we see questions about morale, about progress in killing terrorists, about the state of the insurgency, about the prospects for democracy and economic growth in Iraq. There are questions aplenty on napalm, interrogation, and (I'm not kidding) doubling the number of bombing missions.

Did Zogby dare to ask anything that might result in good news?

Keep in mind that the men and women in uniform are limited by law from making political statements. If troops are given a chance to express themselves anonymously and fairly, that's great. They are probably the best barometer of how the mission is going, and how it can be improved. But this Zogby poll isn't a barometer. It is (a) biased, (b) dishonest, or (c) all of the above.

Don't like those options? Neither do I. But that's all they gave us.

I remain thankful that Zogby made this effort, and I hope they will try again in a manner that is (d) insightful, (e) comprehensive, and maybe even (f) irrefutably profound.

Tim Kane ([e-mail]) is an economist and Bradley Fellow in the Center for Data Analysis at the Heritage Foundation, and a veteran Air Force officer.

Answer 8

I think second guessing the leaders is EXACTLY what needs to happen.
Just because every credible general that disapproved of this war was drummed out of the service by Bush & Co does not mean that the ones left have any more sense than their leader.
PROBLEM IS BUSH HAS ADHD AND WON'T LISTEN

Does he listen to the troops
A poll taken last year showed that an overwhelming majority of troops in Iraq WANTED US OUT OF THERE BY NOW.
http://www.zogby.com/news/readnews.dbm?i...
An overwhelming majority of 72% of American troops serving in Iraq think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year, and more than one in four say the troops should leave immediately, a new Le Moyne College/Zogby International survey shows.
The poll, conducted in conjunction with Le Moyne College’s Center for Peace and Global Studies, showed that 29% of the respondents, serving in various branches of the armed forces, said the U.S. should leave Iraq “immediately,” while another 22% said they should leave in the next six months. Another 21% said troops should be out between six and 12 months, while 23% said they should stay “as long as they are needed
Does he listen to the generals that have experience
Retired generals are speaking out against this war and the civilian leadership that thought it up and messed it up. Retired, yes. But all senior generals are (or at least consider themselves) members of a rather exclusive club, and when they speak out, it's not impossible that they express the opinions of their active peers.
The list is impressive. In a New York Times op-ed column, retired Major Gen. Paul Eaton, who helped revive the Iraqi army, described Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as "incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically" and called for his resignation. Retired Lt. Gen. William Odom, former director of the National Security Agency and now a Yale professor, said in a speech covered by the Providence Journal that America's invasion of Iraq might be the worst strategic mistake in American history.
Publicizing his book, "The Battle for Peace," in a recent "Meet the Press" appearance, retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, a four-star former commander of the Central Command, describes administration behavior that ranged from "true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility" to "lying, incompetence and corruption." Another Marine, retired Lt. Gen. Greg Newbold, has written in Time magazine that the Iraq war was unnecessary. Finally, Lt. Gen. Bernard Trainor and Michael Gordon have written a history of the invasion of Iraq, Cobra II, which describes a willfully self-deluding planning process.
Now, on CNN, Maj. Gen. John Batiste also called for Rumsfeld's resignation; the Washington Post reported that Batiste, commander of the First Infantry Division in Iraq during 2004-2005, turned down a third star and a tour in Iraq as the second-ranking U.S. military officer there. He retired rather than continue to work for Rumsfeld.
In one sense, this "revolt" is the last act of the Vietnam War. The current generation of generals served as junior officers during Vietnam, where they swore that, when they held the senior positions, they would never collapse before civilian delusion and zealotry, as had so many of that era's leaders. They sensed, back then, a moral rot at the top. Zinni took to heart the day he was shot three times in Vietnam, and promised that if he lived, he would always say what he thought was right. He has. An early opponent of the Iraq war, he was called a "traitor" by the White House. Now Newbold, who served as director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff until October 2002, cites an old anti-Vietnam song, "Won't Get Fooled Again" and concludes: We were.
Did he listen to his father
after Saddam Hussein after Iraqi forces were pushed out of Kuwait in the Gulf War.
"We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome."
Seems like besides running the CIA and being a one term president, Bush Sr. was a a fortune teller, for his own kid

Answer 9

We Should have withdrawn as soon as we found out that there were no WMD's and let the courts deal with Saddam. What kind of sh!t is that anyway? We didn't help rebuild Hiroshima after we bombed it. Now we are in a foreign land sticking out like a sore thumb as perfect targets all defence and no offence.

Answer 10

I do not have access to the confidential intelligence information needed to make a determination like this, which is why decisions like this are not left to the general public and are made by those with the information and authority to make proper decisions.