Charts and graphs are always exciting. They add an undeniable aura of quantification to any set of claims. What I like to do, when I see a graph illustrating some news item, is to guess what is being plotted before reading the text or axes labels very carefully. Here, via Ezra Klein, are the results of a BBC/ABC News poll:
The large-type words at the top give away the basic issue being addressed: has the U.S. “surge” of additional forces into the Baghdad area made things better or worse? But you can still get the picture from glancing at the colorful vertical bars, before reading any of the tiny text. Tiny red and yellow outliers flank a rampant baby-blue cohort. So my guess was, red meant “better,” blue meant “stayed the same,” while yellow meant “worse.” That would reflect what I had been hearing in the wake of Gen. David Petraeus’s testimony before Congress, that overall Americans were not in the slightest convinced that the escalation was bringing an end to sectarian and helping to nuture the first flowerings of Iraqi participatory democracy, with checks and balances for all.
But no! A glance at the fine print reveals that it was blue that corresponded to “worse,” while yellow meant “had no effect.” (In my defense, why wasn’t “had no effect” put in the middle?) I knew the war and the surge were unpopular, but had no idea they were that unpopular.
It takes a dip into the text in the article accompanying the graph to figure out what is going on: this was a poll of Iraqis, not Americans. So now it all makes sense; as unpopular as our military efforts are here at home, it’s nothing like the scorn that we receive from the country we are purportedly saving. Admittedly, closer scrutiny did provide clues that the poll might not have been sampling Americans: the question referred specifically to the escalation “in Baghdad and surrounding provinces,” rather than just “in Iraq,” a distinction that is rather too fine for most Americans to fret about. And there were six different forms of the question, addressing levels of detail that again would not be foremost of the minds of anyone who saw things in terms of supporting vs. attacking our brave men and women in uniform. Like the President.
The best argument for leaving Iraq is that the Iraqis don’t want us there. (It’s not an argument that is discussed very much, for reasons about which you are free to speculate.) This poll from earlier this year is illuminating. On the basic issue of “Do you support the presence of Coalition forces in Iraq?” we find that 46% strongly oppose and 32% somewhat oppose, with only 22% support, strongly or otherwise. It’s not completely unambiguous; when asked if those selfsame forces should get up and leave, only 35% just say “leave now” — which you will notice is smaller than the number who strongly oppose their presence. A full 63% want the forces to stay until they achieve some goal of improving the political or security situation, even though they are not judged to be doing a very good job at that. (The numbers might look worse, post-surge.) Which goes to show that Iraqis don’t necessarily think any more clearly about these things than Americans do.
Of course, only 1% of Iraqis want American forces to stay forever, which is what our government has been preparing to do. So someone is going to end up being disappointed.
September 20th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Great stuff! The only improvement I can see is to make the blue bars green.
September 20th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
Who cares that the Iraqis don’t want us there? We’re there to protect Americans!
September 20th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
somehow a [sarcasm] was left out, my apologies.
September 20th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
This is an interesting documentary
See here for the transcript
This fragment is especially funny:
Billions of dollars are wasted on this sort of nonsense.
September 20th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
Something went wrong when I tried to give the link to the documentary,
here it is
September 20th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
“The best argument for leaving Iraq is that the Iraqis don’t want us there.”
That’s Ron Paul’s big argument… it would be much more talked about if the mainstream media weren’t so corrupt.
September 20th, 2007 at 11:29 pm
Yeah, that’s my take as well on why we should leave Iraq. I see people talking about how the war was a mistake, but we should clean up our mess; the problem is that that comes down to a “you break it, you bought” it philosophy, which only works if the thing in question is for sale in the first place. And I don’t think Iraqis consider its country to be for sale… (More here.) By the same token, if Iraqis have some milestone that they’d like us to stay around to reach, then by all means we should stay there until we’ve done that.
September 21st, 2007 at 3:47 am
What, are we playing by pottery barn rules now?
September 21st, 2007 at 7:18 am
[...] interesting graphs on opinion polls as to whether our presence in Iraq is making things better or not. Read the text (it is brief) and [...]
September 21st, 2007 at 9:23 am
For folks who prefer the scholarly literature, a good source document is the Army’s FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency, which is available from the Federation of American Scientists (click here).
My wife and I have a son serving with the Marines, as a sergeant, in Anbar Province. He confirms the accuracy of FM 3-24 and of the recent Congressional testimony Gen. Petraeus and Amb. Croker.
Broadly speaking, a USMC sergeant in Anbar has roughly the same responsibilities and resources as the president of a major university.
This assumes the faculty are hostile, paranoid, divided among themselves, suspicious of democracy, deeply ignorant of the outside world, wholly unaware of their ignorance, and heavily armed.
In other words—except for part about “heavily armed”—being a USMC sergeant is pretty much exactly like being a university president.
September 21st, 2007 at 1:39 pm
Hey, as soon as the Iraqi government signs over all the oil rights to the US and our corporations, as per the pending piece of legislation written by Bremer under the CPA, then our troops can leave. It’s no big deal. Just give us your oil and we will de-occupy your nation. What’s a little extortion among nations????
September 21st, 2007 at 8:54 pm
Its a news poll. It doesn’t say anything about Americans perceptions, it only indicates something about the perceptions of the people who voted in it and how many times. The exact same poll on Fox News site may give a completely different picture.