The Military Times newspapers polled their readers -- active duty subscribers to their papers -- and found that (surprise!) they don't want to see the war escalated.
It has now been four days since the Military Times released its annual poll of active duty troops. The poll, which came out last Friday, contained some striking findings: It found that for the first time, more military personnel disapprove of President Bush's handling of the Iraq war than approve of it.
But there's a more important number in the poll. It also found that only 38 percent of the troops think there should be more troops in Iraq than there are now -- in other words, only 38 percent support an escalation. By contrast, 39 percent of respondents think there should be the same or less troops there.
Also in the poll:
- Only 35 percent approve of Bush's handling of the war. 42 percent disapprove.
- Only 41 percent think the US should've gone to war with Iraq in the first place, down from 65 percent in 2003.
Finally, there's this amazing bit:
In the three previous polls, nearly 60 percent of the respondents identi fied themselves as Republicans, which is about double the popula tion as a whole. But in this year’s poll, only 46 percent of the mili tary respondents said they were Republicans. However, there was not a big gain in those identifying themselves as Democrats — a figure that consistently hovers around 16 percent. The big gain came among people who said they were independents.
Now the poll isn't of rank-and-file soldiers. As they explain:
The results should not be read as representative of the military as a whole; the survey’s respondents are on average older, more experienced, more likely to be officers and more career-oriented than the overall mil itary population.
In other words, we're talking about the most conservative segment of the military. These are lifers. (The enlisted ranks are far more liberal, drawn mostly from poor African American, Latino, and Anglo demographics, though also young thus politically disengaged.)
But back to the poll's numbers on escalation -- they've of course been ignored by the media. No one has mentioned them.
Here's why this is an astonishingly derelict performance: These very same news orgs all lavished extensive coverage on another, completely unscientific measure of the troops' opinions of a "surge." A couple of weeks back, Defense Secretary Robert Gates convened a photo-op sitdown with around a dozen troops to listen to their opinions. Myseriously, all of those assembled agreed that they wanted more troops. The thoughts of this handful of soldiers was granted extensive coverage by The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, CNN and Reuters.
Yet now those same news orgs are refusing to deem it newsworthy when nearly 1,000 active duty troops -- the number that responded to the poll -- offer their opinions and make it clear that there's little support for a "surge" among the military personnel surveyed. Does this poll represent a perfectly scientific measure of what the military thinks on this question? No -- but it's without question the best thing we've seen yet. It's immeasurably better than the staged sit-down with Gates that the big news orgs loved so much.