Polls: Majority of Iraqis want yanks to FO
Yanks will run and run they will its not a question of IF but WHEN…
http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/democrat/news/nation/8623441.htm
** New poll says majority wants Americans gone **
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Sadoun Dulame read the results of his latest poll again and again. He added up percentages, highlighted sections and scribbled notes in the margins.
** No matter how he crunched the numbers, however, he found himself in the uncomfortable position this week of having to tell occupation authorities that the report they commissioned paints the bleakest picture yet of the U.S.-led coalition’s reputation in Iraq. For the first time, according to Dulame’s poll, a majority of Iraqis said they’d feel safer if the U.S. military withdrew immediately.
A year ago, just 17 percent of Iraqis wanted the troops gone, according to Dulame’s respected research center in Baghdad. Now, the disturbing new results mirror what most Iraqis and many international observers have said for months: Give it up. Go home. This just isn’t working. **
Outside of officialdom, there is little appetite for allowing Americans to stay. Anyone still talking about liberation is shushed as disingenuous, especially now that the image of a Saddam Hussein statue crashing to the ground is no longer symbolic of the coalition’s intentions. Instead, many Iraqis said, today’s American presence is best summed up in photos of a laughing female American soldier leading a nude Iraqi prisoner by a dog leash.
Dulame’s grim poll doesn’t even take in the prisoner scandal’s effects. It was conducted in mid-April in seven Iraqi cities. A total of 1,600 people were interviewed, and the margin of error is 3 percentage points. The findings, which must go first to coalition authorities, have not yet been made public.
** According to Dulame, director of the independent Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies, prisoner abuse and other coalition missteps now are fueling a dangerous blend of Islamism and tribalism. For example, while American officials insist that only fringe elements support the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a majority of Iraqis crossed ethnic and sectarian lines to name him the second most-respected man in Iraq, according to the coalition-funded poll. **
“I don’t know why the (Coalition Provisional Authority) continues in these misguided decisions,” Dulame said last week. “But if they pack and leave, it’s a disgrace for us as Iraqis and for them as Americans. Their reputation will be destroyed in the world, and we will be delivered to the fanatics.”
