L.A. Times: Military Families No Longer Support Bush on Iraq

The L.A. Times had a story dated Friday, December 7, 2007, concerning a poll that it sponsored along with the financial news organization, Bloomberg. The subject of the poll was Bush's support among military families. The poll found out that like the rest of the United States, a clear majority of military families don't support Bush's Iraq policy.

Here is a quote from the article:

Nearly six out of every 10 military families disapprove of Bush's job performance and the way he has run the war, rating him only slightly better than the general population does.

And among those families with soldiers, sailors and Marines who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan, 60% say that the war in Iraq was not worth the cost, the same result as all adults surveyed.

Not only do military personnel believe that the war was not worth the cost, but 58% of them want the U.S. to withdraw its troops from Iraq within a year. Only 35% are willing to stay until victory, whatever that means in this war.

What's also interesting is that military families believe that Democrats, and not Republicans, will best serve the interests of military personnel. This is from the Times' article about the poll:

Now the disapproval of Bush appears to have transferred to his party. Republican leanings of military families that began with the Vietnam War -- when Democratic protests seemed to be aimed at the troops as much as the fighting -- have shifted, the poll results show.

When military families were asked which party could be trusted to do a better job of handling issues related to them, respondents divided almost evenly: 39% said Democrats and 35% chose Republicans. The general population feels similarly: 39% for Democrats and 31% for Republicans.

Democratic opponents of the war should be trumpeting this poll and its findings at every opportunity. Bush claims the right to define what "support for our troops" means but he is less concerned with the troops and more concerned with his own, narrow agenda. Americans need to know that supporting the troops has little, if anything, to so with supporting Bush and his incompetent administration.