Poll: Bush Can't be Trusted on Iran
The good news is that a majority of Americans does not trust George W. Bush to deal with Iran and its nuclear program. The bad news is that 2 in 5 Americans want to attack Iran if it continues its nuclear energy program.
Former Iranian president and current head of the Expediency Council, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani affirmed on Wednesday,
"We are not threatening anyone. Our (nuclear) capabilities will be at the service of peace and cooperation with others."
He also said that a peaceful resoluiont of the crisis between the US and Iran is still a possibility.
posted by Juan Cole @ 4/13/2006 06:05:00 AM
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11 Comments:
I can't believe this is happening again. Yes I can. And once again the media pumps up the dialogue.
Juan – I read the poll results in the LA Times slightly differently from you.
The article says “Asked whether they would support military action if Iran continued to produce material that could be used to develop nuclear weapons, 48% of the poll's respondents, or almost half, said yes; 40% said no.”
So 2 in 5 Americans are against military action whilst more than that, nearly half, are in favour.
In addition, “A majority of respondents, 61%, said they believed that Iran would eventually get nuclear weapons”.
In other words, a clear majority of Americans think Iran is on course to get nuclear weapons and nearly half want the US to take military action to prevent it, with only 2 in 5 opposed.
That being the case you can read the poll results on public trust in Bush’s ability to handle the situation in two ways. As good news, or as something else.
The article says, “54% said they did not trust him to "make the right decision about whether we should go to war with Iran," while 42% of respondents said they trusted him to do so.”
The problem is that a significant proportion of the public believe that the “right decision” is military action. A plausible interpretation of the poll results could therefore be that there are many members of the US public that are more hawkish on Iran than they believe Bush to be, and that they may well outnumber those who see themselves as more dovish than the President on this issue.
The hawkish section of the public may well believe that Bush is too scarred by the Iraq misadventure to do what they feel is necessary in the case of Iran. We may ask ourselves why they do not share his fears, and how marginal support for an attack on Iran can apparently co-exist simultaneously with significant opposition to war in Iraq. We might conclude, as others have done, that majority US public support for wars is linked to the perceived costs to themselves, not to the morality of the military action or to the costs to the victims in the country being attacked. For many, in other words, war is fine as long as the US is winning; which is a good thing by definition. The perception may be that if Iran is to be bombed from a great height, with few or no ground troops exposed to Iranian fire, then damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. After seeing at least 100,000 Iraqis killed in the current war, according to the best estimates available, there will be many people across the world, not just in Iran, who are less than enthused by these poll results.
I did not see the 2 in 5 support for an attack based on a nuclear energy program, only a weapons program. Of course the administration of VICE President Cheney obscures the difference. Someone should explain to him and his neo-Likud handlers that Iran wants the nuclear energy for, duh, energy, and when they succeed, there will be more oil available for export as well as more electricity availble for export. As in to Iraq in opposition to and in defiance of American "democratic propagation."
If Cheney would only start thinking with more anterior parts of his anatomy and worry less about using 500 kiloton democracy spreaders, the region might have better prospects.
And now for something completely different:
7. The botulisms that have to stay in the secret underground labs become jealous of their siblings who get to go on all those road trips.
' Asked whether they would support military action if Iran continued to produce material that could be used to develop nuclear weapons, 48% of the poll's respondents, or almost half, said yes; 40% said no. '
I read that as saying that 40 out of 100 did not support an attack on Iran, and that 48 out of 100 did support such an attack.
But notice the question "..if Iran continued to produce material that could be used to develop nuclear weapons..."
Iran has not yet produced any material that can be used to make nuclear weapons.
You may again call this "sloppy" reporting Juan Cole. You're a more politic man than I.
I call this the continuing disinformation campaign of the MSM. Just as they beat the drums for war in Iraq, so too are they beating the drums for war in Iran.
The US media are complicit in the war crimes of the present American regime, and the print media are in as deep as Murdoch's FOX.
"2 in 5 Americans want to attack Iran if it continues its nuclear energy program"
Man, you'd think we would have learned something after 3 years of attacking other countries because we are afraid of them.
Descredited Bush = peace?
Beware. If Ahmadinejad believes Bush is discredited, won't he be just that more bold? Doesn't this raise the gambit?
A 13-Apr-06 WP editorial: "Iran has announced plans to install 3,000 centrifuges at its plant in Natanz by the end of 2006; according to former nuclear weapons inspector David Albright, that many working centrifuges could produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon in less than a year."
Some accuse Bush of a messianic delusion. Unfortunately, Iran's leader seems to have a similar disorder. So much grandstanding and chest thumping.
Ahmadinejad's ancestors supposedly invented chess. Hopefully, he remembers that is adversary includes more than one lame king and some pawns.
Specifically:
http://meria.idc.ac.il/journal/2006/jv10no1a7.html
Opponents to US confrontation of Iran have to argue either: 1) they believe Iran, despite all its oil and gas, wants nuclear energy only to generate electricity; or 2) an Iran with the Bomb does not merit any particular anxiety, that it would never (for example) occupy southern Iraq or "liberate" its religious brethren in (the oil rich) parts of Saudi.
Quote from LATIMES cited in OP:
"Americans' support for military action against Iran has fluctuated in recent years. In a Times/Bloomberg poll in January, 57% said they would support military action if Iran continued to produce material that could be used to develop nuclear weapons. But in a Fox News poll in January 2005, 41% of respondents said they believed the United States should "take military action to keep Iran from trying to develop a nuclear weapons program."
75% of the population are SJ personality types.
At the time Bush-Cheney-Powell, et al. got America to back their act of aggression against Iraq, 75% were all for it.
However, I would speculate if polled, some 75% would not think of the US as a belligerent party.
3,000 Centrifuges cannot produce enough fissionable material for a bomb in a year. That is ridiculous. It would take many years, at that rate, assuming Iranian technology were first-rate. Plus, they don't have 3,000 functioning centrifuges and haven't proven they can create big cascades. They could not possibly build 3,000 centrifuges or import them secretly.
This whole thing is propaganda on both sides. You are being lied to. You have to decide if you really want to throw a couple more trillion dollars at defense contractors and Republican party hangers-on. Remember that you are mostly borrowing the money, thus turning your children and grandchildren into debt slaves to Halliburton and Boeing.
In 1999, after India and Pakistan had both tested their nukes, a Hizbollah member in Beirut asked me how I felt now that my country had nuclear weapons...
What struck me was not the question itself, but the enthusiastic almost joyous expression on the person's face - as if he were happy that two more countries had the nuke...
After having explored such sentiments further, I am convinced that Iranians, and their Shiite allies in other countries, look upon the nuclear weapon as a strategic DEFENSIVE posture - one that would enable Iran to effectively deter any future military adventures on its soil from ANY foreign nuclear power...
People regularly point to Israel's nukes, but let's not forget that other major world powers with a history of having an eye on Iraq have all armed themselves with nukes in the last fifty years... Iran already has a proven MRBM capability (medium range ballistic missile - Ghadr 101 and Shahab 3 series), so it would be quite logical for them to develop a nuclear warhead and attain effective nuclear deterrence capabilities...
Given the recent example of Iraq's lack of WMD, and the effective deterrence posture posed by North Korea's nukes, it is amply clear to defense policy thinkers in Iran that deterrence works...
Those who claim that Iran wants nukes to launch them to destroy Israel seem to forget their geography - any nuke attack on Israel will kill thousands of Palestinians... The Iranians want to be the leaders of the Arab world, not outcasts.
And lastly - The single most important reason for the failure of the NPT is not Pakistan's A.Q. Khan... The reason why non-proliferation efforts have stalled is because the group of nuclear states have done NOTHING to disarm... Instead, the Bush administration has started building MORE nukes, and also wants to keep the option of using nukes on Iran...
Why would Iran not want a nuclear deterrence capability in this situation?
I strongly object to this statement in the LA Times article: "...the discovery that U.S. intelligence was wrong to declare that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction" is presented as a major reason why Americans are cautious about military action against Iran. What we actually discovered is that available intelligence at the time was very mixed, that the administration pressured analysts to get what they wanted, and we were subject to distortions and lies from the administratioin. Blaming "U.S. intelligence" is nothing more than a Bush administration talking point that they resorted to when they were exposed - and the reporter perpetuates it. I hope this reporter's naive assumption was not one of the assumptions involved in the design of the poll research.
I was thinking about the 5 or 6 retired Iraq generals who have called for Rumsfeld's resignation.
Anyone notice what's missing from this dialog?
When ever someone of any prominence -- Howard Dean, John Kerry, The Dixie Chicks, Cindy Sheehan -- or even Joe Citizen like you or me -- has criticized the war or its prosecution, the Mighty Wurlitzer of the Right is cranked up and the dissident voices are accused of "not supporting our troops," "giving aid & comfort to our enemies," "hating America," "wanting America to fail," even of treason. The President we criticize quickly becomes "The Commander-in-Chief" and we are told that we are damaging the morale of the troops in the field who have to hear our traitorous messages on CNN.
Anyone else notice that the right-wing noise machine is not accusing these recently-retired Generals of any of these crimes?
After all, who do "our troops in the field" pay more attention to, the Dixie Chicks, or generals of our Armed Forces?
Where are the AM radio jocks and warbloggers? Why aren't they calling for these men's arrest?
I don't know what we should do about it in terms of media tactics, but I think it's a glaring inconsistency that should be raised by the left blogosphere.
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