[lbo-talk] 57% back hit on Iran

[Doug Henwood]

Los Angeles Times - January 27, 2006

57% Back a Hit on Iran if Defiance Persists
The war has not diminished Americans' support for military action 
against Iraq's neighbor if nuclear pursuits aren't dropped.

By Greg Miller, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON - Despite persistent disillusionment with the war in Iraq, 
a majority of Americans supports taking military action against Iran 
if that country continues to produce material that can be used to 
develop nuclear weapons, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found.

The poll, conducted Sunday through Wednesday, found that 57% of 
Americans favor military intervention if Iran's Islamic government 
pursues a program that could enable it to build nuclear arms.

Support for military action against Tehran has increased over the 
last year, the poll found, even though public sentiment is running 
against the war in neighboring Iraq: 53% said they believe the 
situation there was not worth going to war.

The poll results suggest that the difficulties the United States has 
encountered in Iraq have not turned the public against the 
possibility of military actions elsewhere in the Middle East.

Support for a potential military confrontation with Iran was 
strongest among Republican respondents, among whom 76% endorsed the 
idea. But even among Democrats, who overwhelmingly oppose the war in 
Iraq, 49% supported such action.

In follow-up interviews, some respondents said they believed Iran 
posed a more serious threat than Saddam Hussein's Iraq did.

"I really don't think Saddam had anything to do with terrorism, but 
Iran, I believe, does," said Edward Wtulich, of Goshen, N.Y. He was 
among the 1,555 adults who participated in this week's survey, which 
has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. 
"Iran has been a problem, I think, for years," Wtulich said, "and 
we've known about it."

Wtulich, a registered Democrat and retired manager for the New York 
City Housing Authority, said he supported taking a hard line with 
Iran despite the strain of the Iraq war on the U.S. military.

"It makes me scared," he said, "but we may not have a choice."

Experts said the public's views on Iran appeared to have hardened in 
part because of the more aggressive anti-Western posture of Iran 
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Elected last year, he has riled the 
international community with remarks denying the Holocaust and with 
declarations that Iran will defy European and U.S. pressure and 
continue to pursue efforts to enrich uranium.

His comments have fostered an impression of him as "very reckless, a 
real rogue, as opposed to simply a populist," said political science 
professor John Mueller of Ohio State University, who is an authority 
on wartime public opinion.

Mueller said that Americans' rising support for confronting Iran was 
"impressive," especially considering their misgivings about the war 
in Iraq, and that their support suggested "concerns about the new 
president." But he added that poll respondents are often more 
inclined to voice support for military intervention when the question 
is framed broadly and the potential for casualties is unclear.

"You always get higher support for things like 'military action,' 
because that could just mean bombing, as opposed to sending troops or 
going to war," Mueller said.

Poll respondents expressed a strong preference for the United States 
working with allies to fight international law violations or global 
aggression.

Iran has insisted its nuclear program is solely for energy 
production. But the United States and other Western governments 
suspect Iran's program is aimed at developing weapons.

European nations that have negotiated with Iran over its program want 
the matter referred to the United Nations Security Council. Iran has 
indicated it might be open to a compromise in which Russia would 
provide enriched uranium to Iran, for use exclusively in energy 
reactors.

The American public's position on Iran appears to have hardened over 
the last year, a period marked by an increasing international focus 
on Iran's nuclear program. When a similar question was asked in a 
Times poll last January, 50% favored military action against Iran.

Regarding Iraq, the latest poll shows that although most Americans 
remain disenchanted with the war, opinions have stabilized, at least 
for now. The percentage saying they believe the situation in Iraq was 
not worth going to war over dipped slightly, to 53%, compared with 
56% in a survey a year earlier.

When asked who was winning the war in Iraq, 33% said the United 
States, 7% said the insurgents, and 55% said neither side was winning.

Americans remain divided over how long U.S. forces should stay in 
Iraq: 40% believe the United States should remain in Iraq for "as 
long as it takes," 36% want U.S. troops withdrawn within a year, and 
14% support immediate withdrawal.

Respondents were also divided, largely along party lines, over 
whether the Iraq war is really part of Washington's war on terrorism; 
51% say it is, 46% say it is not. President Bush has repeatedly cast 
Iraq as the central front in the war on terrorism. But many of his 
administration's prewar claims about Iraq's ties to Al Qaeda have 
turned out to have been overstated or based on unreliable 
intelligence sources.

The poll also found that 32% of Americans believed that terrorism 
around the world had increased because of the Iraq situation, 17% 
believed it had decreased, and 47% believed the problem was about the 
same.