[Mb-civic] Troops to Bush: Get Us Out of Here!

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

CounterPunch - Mar 2, 2006
http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff03022006.html

Troops to Bush: Get Us Out of Here!

By DAVE LINDORFF

Well, now we have it.

If you're one of those people with a yellow "Support the Troops" magnet on
your car, you might consider doing what 72 percent of those troops in Iraq
want, which is to go home.

You might not know it if you get your news from TV or your local paper--or
even if you read the New York Times but skip the opinion page--but Zogby
International, a leading polling organization, just did a major poll of
944 American soldiers and marines in Iraq and found that nearly three
quarters of them thought the US should exit Iraq within a year. More than
half thought the US should leave within six months, and 29 percent said
the US should leave "immediately." (That's what the Commander in Chief and
the vice president, both of whom avoided having to fight in Vietnam, like
to call "cutting and running.")

The Zogby poll results should be big news, but it didn't make most of the
mainstream papers or the major TV news programs.

A spokesperson at Zogby said, philosophically, "This is the kind of story
that has a long shelf life. These are not the kinds of opinions that shift
up and down rapidly; they are strongly held opinions being expressed by
the troops who were interviewed. We find that these kinds of polls don't
get covered as news in themselves in today's media. They tend to get
picked up and used to illuminate other stories, over time."

The spokesperson, Communications Director Fritz Wenzel, said that the 48
hours following Zogby's release of the new poll, with its startling
results, were "the busiest days I've had in this job," with over 50
reporters contacting him for interviews. Oddly though, this busiest day of
calling didn't produce much in the way of stories.

A likely explanation for this seeming paradox is that reporters clearly
recognized the news value of a poll finding that the vast majority of
American forces in Iraq believe that the war is a fiasco and that it's
time to get the hell out, but senior management wouldn't let them go with
the story. That's why the poll results, instead of being reported as the
breaking news that they are, will end up being tucked discretely into
broader pieces, as the Washington Post did, putting the information midway
through an article on President Bush's falling approval rating (now at
34%). That's why the New York Times ignored the story in its news pages,
and let it be covered in an op-ed column by Nicholas Kristof.

The poll, conducted between mid-January and mid-February, asked the troops
other questions besides just the one about staying and fighting on or
going home.

Among the other startling things Zogby discovered:

    * While the administration keeps going on about "foreign fighters"
    being
the problem in Iraq, only 26% of the troops questioned thought eliminating
foreign fighters would weaken the insurgency.

    * The strongest opposition to "staying the course" in Iraq came from
reserve and National Guard troops, but even among active-duty Marines, the
most gung-ho of troops in Iraq, 58% favored a pull-out within a year.
Nearly half of reserve and guard troops favored an immediate pull-out.

    * While the president talks about starting to reduce the number of US
troops in Iraq, currently at a peak of 136,000 (a political imperative
with congressional elections coming up this November), a majority of
troops in the country say it would take a doubling of troops and a stepped
up bombing campaign to control the Iraqi insurgency.

    * A clear majority of the troops oppose torture and aggressive
interrogation techniques and four out of five polled oppose the use of
such banned weapons as napalm and phosphorus bombs, such as US forces
employed in the assault on Fallujah in November 2004.

    * This kind of information, which runs counter to the prevailing
    wisdom
about attitudes of soldiers in the field, should be big news based upon
the standard "man-bites-dog" theory of what constitutes news, but so far,
the major media are for the most part ducking it, treating it as a
"dog-bites-man" non-story.

A good illustration of how this kind of journalistic cowardice undermines
effective political discourse in America is provided by the continuing
ignorance about the causes of the war. Even in America itself, a large
percentage of people still believe, against all the evidence, that
invading Iraq made sense because Saddam Hussein was behind the 9-11
attacks. He was not, as even the president has been grudgingly forced to
admit. Yet the media have done such a bad job of making this clear that
Zogby reports 85 percent of troops in Iraq still think they're fighting
"to retaliate for Saddam's role in the 9-11 attacks."

The clearest message of the Zogby poll is that those who want to "support
the troops" now know what the troops themselves want, and what they want
is "OUT!"

Those Americans who want to do something significant to support the troops
beyond just displaying a meaningless yellow ribbon might start by calling
their local media outlets and asking why there hasn't been a story about
the latest Zogby poll.

That could be followed up by a few calls to local Congressional
delegations, calling attention to the poll, and demanding an end to the
war, in the interest of supporting our troops.

[Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the
Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch 
columns
titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common Courage Press.
Lindorff's new book, "The Case for Impeachment", co-authored by Barbara
Olshansky, is due out May 1.]



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"A war of aggression is the supreme international crime." -- Robert Jackson,
 former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor

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