It seems I was right after all when I pre­dicted that Pres­i­dent Xanex’s news con­fer­ence last week would shift pub­lic opin­ion. At the time, I fore­saw a shift of between 5 and 7 per­cent­age points in favor of war. Well, accord­ing to a New York Times/CBS poll con­ducted March 7 to 9, 44 per­cent of respon­dents said the United States should act against Iraq “soon” com­pared to 36 per­cent two weeks ago — right in line with my 5 – 7 per­cent­age points, given the poll’s mar­gin of error. On the brighter side, how­ever, a major­ity — 52 per­cent — of respon­dents want to con­tinue to give weapons inspec­tors more time. On the other hand, that num­ber is down from 62 per­cent two weeks ago, indi­cat­ing an ero­sion of con­fi­dence in the inspec­tion regime.
As far as Bush mak­ing the case for attack­ing Iraq, the num­bers haven’t budged since the last poll con­ducted March 4 – 5, with 52 per­cent say­ing the pres­i­dent has pre­sented enough evi­dence and 43 per­cent say­ing he hasn’t. Pre­vi­ous results were 53 per­cent and 42 per­cent, respec­tively.
Encour­ag­ingly, 60 per­cent of respon­dents want the United States to take the views of its allies — both of them — into account, com­pared to 36 per­cent who want the United States to act uni­lat­er­ally. When it comes to the Secu­rity Coun­cil and pos­si­ble vetoes from France, Rus­sia or China, how­ever, the num­bers are much closer, with 44 per­cent say­ing Amer­ica should act any­way and 49 per­cent say­ing Amer­ica should take the veto(es) into account, results that fall within the mar­gin of error. Con­fus­ingly, though, a solid 55 per­cent approved of the U.S. tak­ing action even if the Secu­rity Coun­cil nixes the lat­est res­o­lu­tion set­ting a March 17 dead­line for Iraq to pro­duce evi­dence of dis­ar­ma­ment. Forty-one per­cent would dis­ap­prove of mil­i­tary action, indi­cat­ing that a major­ity of Amer­i­cans are con­fused on what the word “veto” means.
Over all, 66 per­cent to 30 per­cent favor using mil­i­tary action to remove Sad­dam Hus­sein from power.
Inter­est­ingly, 51 per­cent of respon­dents think Bush is more inter­ested in remov­ing Sad­dam from power than in rid­ding Iraq of weapons of mass destruc­tion (26 per­cent.) At the same time, 40 per­cent of respon­dents were _personally_ inter­ested in root­ing out WMD and 34 per­cent were per­son­ally inter­ested in remov­ing Sad­dam.
The respon­dents indi­cate the pub­lic is split on Bush’s moti­va­tions, with 48 per­cent say­ing this war is dri­ven by a per­sonal desire to fin­ish his father’s busi­ness and 46 per­cent say­ing per­sonal desires are not involved. Per­haps most tellingly, how­ever, is that 62 per­cent of respon­dents don’t think the admin­is­tra­tion is telling the pub­lic what it needs to know about its rea­sons for attack­ing Iraq, and 33 per­cent think the admin­is­tra­tion is the model of loqua­cious­ness.
And finally, almost half — *45 percent* — believe Sad­dam Hus­sein was per­son­ally involved in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York City and Wash­ing­ton, D.C.
The poll was con­ducted via tele­phone among 1,010 adults with a 95 per­cent con­fi­dence and a 3 point mar­gin of error.