US Military Finds All Iraqi Groups Blame U.S. Invasion for Violence

Every poll taken of Iraqis has said essentially the same thing.

What Iraqis Want

More Professor Smartass on Iraqi opinion

The news here is that these results come from focus groups conducted by the US military.

So if your righty friends disagree with this, you can tell them they are calling the troops liars.

The other significant thing is that the military has signed contracts with Gallup to do four polls a month. Both Republicans and most Democrats in Congress have either been silent about what the Iraqis think of our occupation or blatantly lied.

The related lie is that Iraq must be divided to restore peace and that Iraqis want that. Polls show most Iraqis want ONE country, and much of the sectarian violence is likely instigated by Saudi foreign fighters, since more come from Saudi than almost all other countries combined according to Israeli and Saudi studies.


Clearly, the Iraqis want us to leave, Americans overwhelmingly want us to leave, and the military is publicizing data that makes the case for pulling out.

Who exactly are we teaching democracy by staying?

KEY EXCERPTS:

washingtonpost.com
All Iraqi Groups Blame U.S. Invasion for Discord, Study Shows

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 19, 2007; A14


Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of "occupying forces" as the key to national reconciliation, according to focus groups conducted for the U.S. military last month.

That is good news, according to a military analysis of the results. At the very least, analysts optimistically concluded, the findings indicate that Iraqis hold some "shared beliefs" that may eventually allow them to surmount the divisions that have led to a civil war.

***
Even though members of the military "understand the limitations" of polling data, Rapp said, "subjective measures" are an important part of the mix. In July, the military signed a contract with Gallup for four public opinion polls a month in Iraq: three nationwide and one in Baghdad. Lincoln Group, which has conducted surveys for the military since shortly after the invasion, received a year-long contract in January to conduct focus groups.

Outside of the military, some of the most widespread polling in Iraq has been done by D3 Systems, a Virginia-based company that maintains offices in each of Iraq's 18 provinces. Its most recent publicly released surveys, conducted in September for several news media organizations, showed the same widespread Iraqi belief voiced by the military's focus groups: that a U.S. departure will make things better. A State Department poll in September 2006 reported a similar finding.

Matthew Warshaw, a senior research manager at D3, said that despite security improvements, polling in Iraq remains difficult. "While violence has gone down, one of the ways it has been achieved is by effectively separating people. That means mobility is limited, with roadblocks by the U.S. and Iraqi military or local militias," Warshaw said in an interview.

FULL TEXT

POLL CHARTS: Iraqis don't want to give OIL WEALTH to Bush cronies

Not surprisingly, a recent poll of Iraqis commissioned by Oil Change and other groups found that they know their oil income could provide a decent living for their people.

Iraqis would also prefer that their national oil company develop their oil NOT transnational oil companies, which directly contradicts the intent of the Bush-backed Hydrocarbon Law which will give up to 80% of Iraq's oil income to companies like Chevron, Exxon, and Shell.

Iraqis also said they don't haven't heard enough about Bush's oil law to feel informed on it--sounds a lot like the Patriot Act and just about everything else the Bushies force on us with as little debate and scrutiny as they can get away with.

If we were even remotely interested in teaching the Iraqis democracy, Washington, DC would be talking about the results of this poll. But they don't because as Huffpost blogger Robert Naiman said:

If supporters of continuing the indefinite U.S. occupation of Iraq were forced to concede that Iraqis don't support what the U.S. is doing -- not to mention that nearly a million Iraqis have died -- the whole argument about "cut and run" would be exposed as a cruel farce. If one is engaged in an immoral enterprise, there's nothing brave about "staying the course."

FULL TEXT

Click any chart to see full-sized.

This is the crucial one:


Questions: Have you been kept in the dark and fed on bullshit?




More on this poll

OIL THEFT motive for IRAQ WAR resources

POLL: Iraqis want US out of Iraq

I missed this PIPA poll when it came out in September 2006.

The results are pretty straight forward, and despite the foreign policy establishments talking point about civil war and an even greater bloodbath after the US pulls out, Shia and Sunni Iraqis seem to roughly agree on wanting the US out and agree that it will result in a more peaceful Iraq. They also agree that we won't leave even if asked to.

All charts from PIPA.








The numbers in this chart shows the difference between January and September 2006. Most troubling is that the Shia (the largest ethnic group in Iraq) went from a minority approving of attacks on US forces to a solid 62% majority.



Link to PIPA poll report

What Iraqis think of Bush's OIL THEFT law he is forcing on them

Earlier polls of Iraqis on the occupation

99% of Iraqis vs. "elected" liars

One percent of Iraqis say occupation is making them safer in a recent British intel commissioned poll. That's probably less than the margin of error.

Past polls have shown similar overwhelming opposition to the occupation:
http://professorsmartass.blogspot.com/2005/07/if-were-teaching-iraqis-democracy-what.html

There are two depressing implications to this story.

One is that the elected prime minister of Iraq begs us to stay in the same in article, leading me to wonder how legitimate their democracy is when their leader can ignore numbers like this.

Worse, is what it says about our democracy. I expect Republicans to support the war. That is what they are paid to do. But I do not expect Democrats to not only ignore the wishes of the American people about pulling out of Iraq, but also lie to us about the situation there as Sen. Carl Levin did yesterday in this LA Times story:

The Michigan senator, who is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee and a frequent visitor to Iraq, said that one of the few points on which the main Iraqi ethnic and sectarian political groups agree was that all want U.S. forces to remain in the country. The Bush administration should use that consensus to forge political compromise, Levin argued.

FULL TEXT OF LA TIMES ARTICLE

It is not enough to vote for Democrats and expect everything will be swell. While they will be better on civil rights and domestic policy, in foreign policy, the leaders of the party seem just as eager to use our tax dollars to steal and kill for corporate America, actions we do not profit from in any way.

KEY EXCERPTS:

Secret MoD poll: Iraqis support attacks on British troops
By Sean Rayment, Defence Correspondent
(Filed: 23/10/2005)

Millions of Iraqis believe that suicide attacks against British troops are justified, a secret military poll commissioned by senior officers has revealed.

• Forty-five per cent of Iraqis believe attacks against British and American troops are justified - rising to 65 per cent in the British-controlled Maysan province;

• 82 per cent are "strongly opposed" to the presence of coalition troops;

• less than one per cent of the population believes coalition forces are responsible for any improvement in security;

• 67 per cent of Iraqis feel less secure because of the occupation;

That appears to have failed, with the poll showing that 71 per cent of people rarely get safe clean water, 47 per cent never have enough electricity, 70 per cent say their sewerage system rarely works and 40 per cent of southern Iraqis are unemployed.

But Iraq's President Jalal Talabani pleaded last night for British troops to stay. "There would be chaos and perhaps civil war," he said. "We are now fighting a world war launched by terrorists against civilisation, against democracy, against progress, against all the values of humanity.

"If British troops withdrew, the terrorists would say, 'Look, we have imposed our will on the most accomplished armed forces in the world and terror is the way to oblige the Europeans to surrender to us'."

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iraq war wmd terrorism oil cindy sheehan president george w bush fascist real reasons telegraph dlc democratic leadership council republican GOPconservative corruption occupation halliburton colonialism white mans burden professor smartass iraq democrat lies peak oil propaganda corporation fascism democracy political opinion george w bush, war on terror, muslim, public opinion, opinion, public relations, foreign policy, al qaeda terrorist Secret MoD poll: Iraqis support attacks on British troops, worst president ever failure war criminal

If we're teaching Iraqis democracy, what do polls say they want?

GRAPHICS: What do Iraqis want? An important Q if teaching democracy


The Coalition Provisional Authority did a poll of Iraqis on a number of questions and one was whether they view us as liberators or occupiers.

The results were pretty grim:










LINK TO POLL DATA

A Gallup poll done around the same time was only slightly more supportive of us staying.

The only poll that has shown anywhere near majority support for us being there was from a right wing think tank, that has a vested interest in making this Neocon adventure look good.

The argument that we are fighting terrorists there instead of here assumes there's a set number of people who are mad at us, and we can eventually kill enough of them to make the problem go away.

The problem is, at the base of all of it, is a resentment of our involvement in propping up their dictators, who don't share the oil wealth with their own people. All this gets channeled into religion because they have no effective political outlets in most countries over there. So by intervening militarily, we are making more not less people resent and want to attack us.

Polls of reaction in other Arab countries to our invasion of Iraq confirm this. A Zogby poll in 2003 found that 90% disapproved of our invasion
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030317-025106-382...

Zogby's most recent poll of Arab countries shows MORE disapprove with 98% of Egyptians (our allies) disapproving.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7080-2004Jul2...

If you want to teach people democracy, you can't do it with a gun in their face.

Gorbachev accidentally showed us an easier way to do it. He told the dictators of Eastern Europe the Soviets couldn't afford to help them oppress their people anymore. Within a few years, those dictators were out of jobs, and those countries were more or less democracies.

And I don't think a single Russian soldier was killed.

Musharraf, Mubarak, the Saudis, various kings and generals, would all wither away and die without our money and help of our intelligence services. The results might be messy, but the people over there wouldn't blame us for it--they'd thank us.

Print this out, and send it to your congressman and senators and tell them to stop treating us and the Iraqis like fucking idiots.

They are there to steal the oil. Stop it. Don't use our tax dollars and soldiers lives to enrich a very, very few. Or we'll start wondering about how seriously they take democracy here.