Military Support For Bush D-r-o-p-p-i-n-g

Military Times Polls: "Approval of the president’s Iraq policy fell 9 percentage points from 2004; a bare majority, 54 percent, now say they view his performance on Iraq as favorable.

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The poll also found diminished optimism that U.S. goals in Iraq can be accomplished, and a somewhat smaller drop in support for the decision to go to war in 2003.

The mail survey, conducted Nov. 14 through Dec. 23, is the third annual effort by the Military Times to measure the opinions of the active-duty military on political and morale issues. 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 military population. But the numbers are among the best measures of opinion in a difficult-to-survey population. The professional military seems to be lessening in its certainty about the wisdom of the Iraq intervention and the way it has been handled,” said Richard Kohn, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina who studies civil-military relations. “This seems to be more and more in keeping with changes in public views, and that’s not surprising.”"