four polls showing most Americans against war in Afghanistan...

Hi all...

Catch Frank Rich's "How Fox Betrayed Petraeus" column in yesterday's Times?...

Aside from Rich's usual brilliance-- in this case devoted to oft-ignored truths re: mosque in NYC (see below)...

Rich also tolds us that "in the latest CNN poll, American opposition is at an all-time high to both the ostensibly concluded war in Iraq (69 percent) and the endless one in Afghanistan (62 percent)."
[see: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/opinion/22rich.html ; also
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/08/17/poll-opposition-to-iraq-afghanistan-wars-reach-all-time-high/ ]

[recall June ABC News/Washington Post poll showing 53% say war in Afghanistan "not worth fighting":
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=51792 ]


And-- see these AP poll results from Fri.?...from http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/08/20-8 :

Poll: Nearly 6 in 10 oppose war in Afghanistan

Published on Friday, August 20, 2010 by Associated Press
by Glen Johnson

LAWRENCE, Mass. - A majority of Americans see no end in sight in Afghanistan, and nearly six in 10 oppose the nine-year-old war as President Barack Obama sends tens of thousands more troops to the fight, according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll.

With just over 10 weeks before nationwide elections that could define the remainder of Obama's first term, only 38 percent say they support his expanded war effort in Afghanistan - a drop from 46 percent in March. Just 19 percent expect the situation to improve during the next year, while 29 percent think it will get worse. Some 49 percent think it will remain the same.

The numbers could be ominous for the president and his Democratic Party, already feeling the heat for high unemployment, a slow economic recovery and a $1.3 trillion federal deficit. Strong dissent - 58 percent oppose the war - could depress Democratic turnout when the party desperately needs to energize its supporters for midterm congressional elections.

...and let's not forget these CBS News poll numbers from just last month...

From http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20010459-503544.html ...
July 13, 2010 6:30 PM
Poll: Most Want Afghanistan Withdrawal Timeline
Posted by Stephanie Condon

Most Americans continue to say things are going badly for the U.S. in Afghanistan, and those assessments are more pessimistic now than they were just two months ago, a new CBS News poll shows. Most Americans also want a timetable for withdrawal from the country. Today, the poll finds, 62 percent of Americans say the war is going badly, up from 49 percent in May. Just 31 percent say the war in Afghanistan is going well.

My point?...

This...

That for the good of our country...(and for good of Democratic party)...our troops should come home!...

If you agree, call Schumer, Gillibrand, Murphy, Hall, and Hinchey tomorrow at (866) 338-1015...

[yep-- they're payin' extra-special attention to every single call they get now-- runnin' for re-election!]

Pass it on...(and help out the good folks of DutchessPeace.org!)...

Joel
444-0599/876-2488
joeltyner@earthlink.net
http://www.PoJoWatch.blogspot.com

p.s. This all, of course, is one more reason to join Rich Carlson (and often Pete Seeger) and I (along with Pat Lamanna, Doris Kelly, many more) Saturdays noon to 2 pm at our peace vigil in Pok./Wappinger at Rt. 9/9D corner and to join Fred Nagel et. al. Weds.'s 5-6 pm in heart of Rhinebeck!...

p.p.s. Check out http://www.NationalPriorities.org if you haven't yet, folks-- as it is now already Dutchess County taxpayers alone have spent well over $1.7 billion on war in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001...

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From yesterday's Times-- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/opinion/22rich.html ...

OP-ED COLUMNIST
How Fox Betrayed Petraeus
By FRANK RICH
Published: August 21, 2010

THE "ground zero mosque," as you may well know by now, is not at ground zero. It's not a mosque but an Islamic cultural center containing a prayer room. It's not going to determine President Obama's political future or the elections of 2010 or 2012. Still, the battle that has broken out over this project in Lower Manhattan - on the "hallowed ground" of a shuttered Burlington Coat Factory store one block from the New York Dolls Gentlemen's Club - will prove eventful all the same. And the consequences will be far more profound than any midterm election results or any of the grand debates now raging 24/7 over the parameters of tolerance, religious freedom, and the real estate gospel of location, location, location.

Here's what's been lost in all the screaming. The prime movers in the campaign against the "ground zero mosque" just happen to be among the last cheerleaders for America's nine-year war in Afghanistan. The wrecking ball they're wielding is not merely pounding Park51, as the project is known, but is demolishing America's already frail support for that war, which is dedicated to nation-building in a nation whose most conspicuous asset besides opium is actual mosques.

So virulent is the Islamophobic hysteria of the neocon and Fox News right - abetted by the useful idiocy of the Anti-Defamation League, Harry Reid and other cowed Democrats - that it has also rendered Gen. David Petraeus's last-ditch counterinsurgency strategy for fighting the war inoperative. How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar when you are calling Muslims every filthy name in the book in New York?

You'd think that American hawks invested in the Afghanistan "surge" would not act against their own professed interests. But they couldn't stop themselves from placing cynical domestic politics over country. The ginned-up rage over the "ground zero mosque" was not motivated by a serious desire to protect America from the real threat of terrorists lurking at home and abroad - a threat this furor has in all likelihood exacerbated - but by the potential short-term rewards of winning votes by pandering to fear during an election season.

We owe thanks to Justin Elliott of Salon for the single most revealing account of this controversy's evolution. He reports that there was zero reaction to the "ground zero mosque" from the front-line right or anyone else except marginal bloggers when The Times first reported on the Park51 plans in a lengthy front-page article on Dec. 9, 2009. The sole exception came some two weeks later at Fox News, where Laura Ingraham, filling in on "The O'Reilly Factor," interviewed Daisy Khan, the wife of the project's organizer, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Ingraham gave the plans her blessing. "I can't find many people who really have a problem with it," she said. "I like what you're trying to do."

As well Ingraham might. Rauf is no terrorist. He has been repeatedly sent on speaking tours by the Bush and Obama State Departments alike to promote tolerance in Arab and Muslim nations. As Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic reported last week, Rauf gave a moving eulogy at a memorial service for Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter murdered by Islamist terrorists in Pakistan, at the Manhattan synagogue B'nai Jeshurun. Pearl's father was in attendance. The Park51 board is chock-full of Christians and Jews. Perhaps the most threatening thing about this fledgling multi-use community center, an unabashed imitator of the venerable (and Jewish) 92nd Street Y uptown, is its potential to spawn yet another coveted, impossible-to-get-into Manhattan private preschool.

In the five months after The Times's initial account there were no newspaper articles on the project at all. It was only in May of this year that the Rupert Murdoch axis of demagoguery revved up, jettisoning Ingraham's benign take for a New York Post jihad. The paper's inspiration was a rabidly anti-Islam blogger best known for claiming that Obama was Malcolm X's illegitimate son. Soon the rest of the Murdoch empire and its political allies piled on, promoting the incendiary libel that the "radical Islamists" behind the "ground zero mosque" were tantamount either to neo-Nazis in Skokie (according to a Wall Street Journal columnist) or actual Nazis (per Newt Gingrich).

These patriots have never attacked the routine Muslim worship services at another site of the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon. Their sudden concern for ground zero is suspect to those of us who actually live in New York. All but 12 Republicans in the House voted against health benefits for 9/11 responders just last month. Though many of these ground-zero watchdogs partied at the 2004 G.O.P. convention in New York exploiting 9/11, none of them protested that a fellow Republican, the former New York governor George Pataki, so bollixed up the management of the World Trade Center site that nine years on it still lacks any finished buildings, let alone a permanent memorial.

The Fox patron saint Sarah Palin calls Park51 a "stab in the heart" of Americans who "still have that lingering pain from 9/11." But her only previous engagement with the 9/11 site was when she used it as a political backdrop for taking her first questions from reporters nearly a month after being named to the G.O.P. ticket. (She was so eager to grab her ground zero photo op that she defied John McCain's just-announced "suspension" of their campaign.) Her disingenuous piety has been topped only by Bernie Kerik, who smuggled a Twitter message out of prison to register his rage at the ground zero desecration. As my colleague Clyde Haberman reminded us, such was Kerik's previous reverence for the burial ground of 9/11 that he appropriated an apartment overlooking the site (and designated for recovery workers) for an extramarital affair.

At the Islamophobia command center, Murdoch's News Corporation, the hypocrisy is, if anything, thicker. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial darkly cited unspecified "reports" that Park51 has "money coming from Saudi charities or Gulf princes that also fund Wahabi madrassas." As Jon Stewart observed, this brand of innuendo could also be applied to News Corp., whose second largest shareholder after the Murdoch family is a member of the Saudi royal family. Perhaps last week's revelation that News Corp. has poured $1 million into G.O.P. campaign coffers was a fiendishly clever smokescreen to deflect anyone from following the far greater sum of Saudi money (a $3 billion stake) that has flowed into Murdoch enterprises, or the News Corp. money (at least $70 million) recently invested in a Saudi media company.

Were McCain in the White House, Fox and friends would have kept ignoring Park51. But it's an irresistible target in our current election year because it revives the most insidious anti-Obama narrative of the many Fox promoted in the previous election year: Obama the closet Muslim and secret madrassa alumnus. In the much discussed latest Pew poll, a record number of Americans (nearing 20 percent) said that our Christian president practices Islam. And they do not see that as a good thing. Existing or proposed American mosques hundreds and even thousands of miles from ground zero, from Tennessee to Wisconsin to California, are now under siege.

After 9/11, President Bush praised Islam as a religion of peace and asked for tolerance for Muslims not necessarily because he was a humanitarian or knew much about Islam but because national security demanded it. An America at war with Islam plays right into Al Qaeda's recruitment spiel. This month's incessant and indiscriminate orgy of Muslim-bashing is a national security disaster for that reason - Osama bin Laden's "next video script has just written itself," as the former F.B.I. terrorist interrogator Ali Soufan put it - but not just for that reason. America's Muslim partners, those our troops are fighting and dying for, are collateral damage. If the cleric behind Park51 - a man who has participated in events with Condoleezza Rice and Karen Hughes, for heaven's sake - is labeled a closet terrorist sympathizer and a Nazi by some of the loudest and most powerful conservative voices in America, which Muslims are not?

In the latest CNN poll, American opposition is at an all-time high to both the ostensibly concluded war in Iraq (69 percent) and the endless one in Afghanistan (62 percent). Now, when the very same politicians and pundits who urge infinite patience for Afghanistan slime Muslims as Nazis, they will have to explain that they are not talking about Hamid Karzai or his corrupt narco-thug government or the questionably loyal Afghan armed forces our own forces are asked to entrust with their lives. The hawks will have to make the case that American troops should make the ultimate sacrifice to build a Nazi - Afghan, I mean - nation and that economically depressed taxpayers should keep paying for it. Good luck with that.

Poor General Petraeus. Over the last week he has been ubiquitous in the major newspapers and on television as he pursues a publicity tour to pitch the war he's inherited. But have you heard any buzz about what he had to say? Any debate? Any anything? No one was listening and no one cared. Everyone was too busy yelling about the mosque.

It's poignant, really. Even as America's most venerable soldier returned from the front to valiantly assume the role of Willy Loman, the product he was selling was being discredited and discontinued by his own self-proclaimed allies at home.

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From http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/08/20-8 ...

Poll: Nearly 6 in 10 oppose war in Afghanistan

Published on Friday, August 20, 2010 by Associated Press

by Glen Johnson

LAWRENCE, Mass. - A majority of Americans see no end in sight in Afghanistan, and nearly six in 10 oppose the nine-year-old war as President Barack Obama sends tens of thousands more troops to the fight, according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll.

With just over 10 weeks before nationwide elections that could define the remainder of Obama's first term, only 38 percent say they support his expanded war effort in Afghanistan - a drop from 46 percent in March. Just 19 percent expect the situation to improve during the next year, while 29 percent think it will get worse. Some 49 percent think it will remain the same.

The numbers could be ominous for the president and his Democratic Party, already feeling the heat for high unemployment, a slow economic recovery and a $1.3 trillion federal deficit. Strong dissent - 58 percent oppose the war - could depress Democratic turnout when the party desperately needs to energize its supporters for midterm congressional elections.

A majority of Americans do welcome Obama's decision to end combat operations in Iraq. Some 68 percent approve, a number unchanged from earlier this year. The last American combat brigade began leaving Iraq on Thursday, ahead of Obama's Aug. 31 deadline for ending the U.S. combat role there.

Seven years after that conflict began, 65 percent oppose the war in Iraq and just 31 percent favor it.

The growing frustration with the Afghanistan war was evident in Massachusetts' 5th Congressional District, not far from Concord where Minutemen fought for a new nation in 1775. In Lawrence, whose textile mills once relied on the roaring Merrimack River, exasperation with the war in Afghanistan is evident.

"If they could resolve the issue, stabilize the government, that would be good. But we can't do this forever and lose more lives," said Terry Landers, 53, an electrician from North Andover.

U.S. troops have suffered more than 1,100 deaths in Afghanistan since fighting began in October 2001, including a monthly record of 66 in July. Last fall, Obama authorized an increase in the force in Afghanistan by 30,000 to 100,000 troops - triple the level from 2008. Many in Congress are increasingly doubtful that the military effort can succeed without a tough campaign against bribery and graft that have eroded the Afghan people's trust in their government.

Opinions in the poll - and among those interviewed - were more positive about Iraq as Obama's deadline for the exit of U.S. combat forces approached.

"I think we really need to give them an opportunity to economically, socially grow," said Mary Campbell, 56, a Lawrence city worker. "I think it's more helpful if we're not in their face all the time, so the deadline is, I think, a good thing, to see how stable they are."

The congressional seat is held by Rep. Niki Tsongas, a Democrat who is the widow of a former senator and one of the party's 1992 presidential contenders, Paul Tsongas. Four Republicans and one independent are seeking to oust her in November, with the primary next month.

Lawrence has lost two sons in Iraq of the more than 4,400 Americans killed since fighting began in March 2003. Obama ran for president in part on a pledge to pull out of Iraq and divert U.S. resources to Afghanistan, and that shift has been accompanied by a changing death toll in each country.

The war views expressed in a Lawrence diner, in a park across from City Hall and at an Essex Street hot dog cart, were echoed by poll participants across the country.

Bea Boynton, 57, of Marysville, Pa., said she is less supportive of the wars than when Obama took office.

"I just think it's not going well. Too many of our men and women are being killed," she said of Afghanistan in particular.

Boynton, a registered Democrat who voted for Republican John McCain in 2008, added: "I don't think what we initially set out to do has been done. I mean, we still don't have (Osama) bin Laden."

Erika Hickert, 68, a retired school teacher in Maricopa, Ariz., said she is an independent who voted for Obama in 2008 and would do so again if given the chance. She felt the same about the wars.

"I'm just tired of taking care of the world," Hickert said. "They need to learn to take care of themselves, and war isn't the way to teach them."

She also doesn't distinguish between Iraq and Afghanistan, even with the conflict winding down in one while ramping up in the other.

"I think of them as one big conflict," said Hickert. "We're militarily supporting both of them."

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August 17, 2010
Poll: Opposition to Iraq, Afghanistan wars reach all time high
Posted: August 17th, 2010 10:18 AM ET

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/08/17/poll-opposition-to-iraq-afghanistan-wars-reach-all-time-high/ ]

(CNN) - Two-thirds of Americans favor President Obama's plan to remove combat troops from Iraq by the end of the month as opposition to the war in that country, as well as the one in Afghanistan, has climbed to new highs.

According to a new CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey, Obama's withdrawal plan wins support not because Americans think the U.S. has achieved its goals in Iraq - only three in 10 feel that way - but because a majority believe that the U.S. will never achieve its goals in that country no matter how long troops remain there.

That's one reason why 69 percent oppose the war in Iraq - the highest amount of opposition in any CNN poll.

Meanwhile, 65 percent favor Obama's plan to remove most combat troops but keep 50,000 there for non-combat duties. Another 19 percent want the U.S. to remove all troops immediately; only 16 percent oppose Obama's plan because they would like to see U.S. troops remain in Iraq indefinitely.

Americans are also pessimistic about what will happen next in Iraq after combat troops are removed but don't feel the same way about what might occur in the U.S. Six in 10 say they are not confident in the Iraqi government's ability to handle the situation in that country. But only 28 percent say that removing U.S. troops from the country increases the chances of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

Unpopularity with the war in Afghanistan also reached an all-time high in CNN polling with 62 percent saying they oppose it. Moreover, confidence in the Afghan government is even lower than it is for the Iraqi government. Seven in 10 Americans are not confident that Hamid Karzai's government can handle the situation there.

In an interview with NBC on Sunday, Gen. David Petraeus, the top general in Afghanistan, made clear that it will take a lot of time and commitment to achieve the overall goal of preventing Afghanistan from again becoming a haven for international terrorism.

"I didn't come out here to carry out a graceful exit or something like that," Petraeus said of taking command in Afghanistan this summer to replace ousted Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

Petraeus also repeated the administration line on plans to begin withdrawing some troops from Afghanistan in August 2011, saying the "transition" will be based on conditions on the ground.

The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll surveyed 1,009 Americans between August 6 and 10 and carries a sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.