In poll, most don't see insurgency weakening
WASHINGTON -- A majority of Americans reject assertions by the Bush administration that the insurgency in Iraq is weakening and are divided on whether victory over the insurgents will have a major impact on terrorism elsewhere in the world, a new
Barely 1 in 5 Americans polled -- 22 percent -- said they believe that the insurgency is getting weaker, while 24 percent said they believe it is strengthening. More than half -- 53 percent -- said resistance to US and Iraqi government forces has not changed.
Also, few of those polled agreed with Vice President Dick Cheney that the insurgency was in its ''last throes." That assertion, which Cheney made recently in an interview with Larry King on CNN, has been challenged by critics of the administration's Iraq policy and defended by Bush officials.
And only 25 percent said they believed that the bloody campaign against US forces and the fledgling Iraqi government is on ''its last legs." Even among those who thought the resistance was weakening, only half said they believed the insurgency was in its final stages.
As with virtually every facet of the Iraq issue, deep partisan divisions were reflected in views of the current state of the insurgency. More than a third of all Republicans -- 35 percent -- said the insurgents were growing weaker in Iraq, compared with 13 percent of all Democrats and 19 percent of all political independents.
The public was sharply divided over another widely publicized assertion about Iraq made by a top administration official. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, speaking last week in Brussels, said in an address to an 80-nation conference on the reconstruction of postwar Iraq that a victory over antigovernment forces will be ''a death knell for terrorism as we know it" elsewhere.
But fewer than half -- 46 percent -- of respondents to the Post-AP poll agreed that defeating the insurgents in Iraq would do much to defeat terrorism elsewhere, while 53 percent said it would have, at best, only some positive impact on the broader antiterrorism campaign.
A total of 1,004 randomly selected adults were interviewed by telephone June 23-26 for this survey. The margin of sampling error for the overall results is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
