Excuse me sir, but I think you've gotten this wrong.
Marine Major Ben Connable wrote this in today's WaPo:
The common wisdom seems to be that Iraq is an unwinnable war and a quagmire and that the only thing left to decide is how quickly we withdraw. Depending on which poll you believe, about 60 percent of Americans think it's time to pull out of Iraq.
How is it, then, that 64 percent of U.S. military officers think we will succeed if we are allowed to continue our work? Why is there such a dramatic divergence between American public opinion and the upbeat assessment of the men and women doing the fighting?
The only poll I could find that came close to agreeing with this statement was a November 17, 2005 poll by The Pew Research Center For the People and the Press.
In the poll, military "opinion leaders" did indeed believe that a stable democracy will succeed in Iraq. However, there's nothing that says, as Maj. Connable does, that these are the people "doing the fighting." In fact, many of the military "opinion leaders" weren't even asked this question. Or any questions. The methodology explained:
The military leaders sample was drawn from a Lexis-Nexis search of retired generals and admirals quoted in American news sources in the past year. Also included was a sample of outstanding officers selected to participate in the Council on Foreign Relations' Military Fellowship program since 2000.
There's nothing that says whether these retired general officers are recent retirees who might have actually served in Iraq (at which point they might also have the added incentive to be optimistic due to their own contributions) or whether they've been out of the Army for many years. There's also nothing that says how many of the 47 military "opinion leaders" were general officers and how many were members of the CFR Military Fellowship program, so suggesting that there's any way to gauge whether this is the opinion of people "doing the fighting" is, at best, problematic and, more realistically, impossible.
The major goes on to say that mid-level officers and NCOs also seem to be optimistic about Iraq, but there's no data except his personal impressions and, I'll tell from an NCOs perspective, a Marine major probably has little chance of actually knowing what his NCOs really think. That's not a dig on him. It's just the truth.
One thing that Maj. Connable didn't mention from the same poll was that those same military "opinion leaders" were all but evenly split on the topic two major issues: A) military leaders support the choice to go to war in the first place by only 49-47 percent; and B) believe that the Iraq war has helped make us safer by only 47-45 percent.
So this poll really tells me that military "opinion leaders" (whoever they are) still believe in the ability of the military to pull America's fat out of the fire in Iraq even though they're evenly split over whether we should be there in the first place and whether it's doing us any good.
Cross-posted at Nitpicker.