A new New York Times/CBS poll (PDF) was released today showing broad opposition among American voters to the idea of invading either Syria or North Korea, with past data showing that despite the rhetoric, Americans are no more on board with either potential war than they have been.
Rather, the poll showed Americans more focused on domestic concerns, and believing that there was no “responsibility” to attack Syria to settle the ongoing civil war, and no need to attack North Korea at all.
The New York Times, predictably, presented this result as showing “broad isolationism” among Americans, though of course none of the questions focused on Americans having any interests abroad and simply jumped straight to whether the US ought to attack specific places.
So far officials have not addressed the unpopularity of starting such wars, though President Obama has reiterated that military options remain open in Syria. How “open” those options can be with an overwhelming majority of Americans on the other side, however, remains unclear.
Ehud Barack Obama is just like George Warmonger Bush, Teddy Roosevelt and JFK. JFK caused the Cuban Missile Crisis and had a plot to overthrow Castro, Roosevelt declared war on Spain and took away its last colonies in Asia and the Pacific. GWB lied about Iraq having WMD's and being involved in 9/11. Obama lied about Libya committing genocide and if he starts a war with Syria, he will lie about them using chemical weapons.
Let's not forget LBJ and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and his sending the first combat troops to Vietnam.
Every USA president needs to have a war in his name.., this is their contract with the economic system rolling the political elites.., without thinking about what people think.., the most popular of them was Bill Clinton.., Madeline Albright planed him the Balkan war.., this time around it was Hillary Clinton..,, and she wants to become the next president…,
CBS News and the New York Times released a poll yesterday on opinions regarding Syria. The poll posed a question to 965 adults nationwide worded as such: "Do you think the United States has a responsibility to do something about the fighting in Syria between government forces and anti-government groups, or doesn't the United States have this responsibility?" Answers included "Yes" by 24% of respondents and "No" by 62% of respondents. CBS headlines blared, "Americans Against Intervention in Syria." The New York Times extrapolated the poll as saying, "Americans are exhibiting an isolationist streak, with majorities across party lines decidedly opposed to American intervention in North Korea or Syria, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll."
While the wording of the poll question on North Korea was acceptable, the poll question on Syria was close to useless due to its ambiguity and use of the word "responsibility". It would be very possible to think that the US has no responsibility to act in Syria, but should do something nonetheless. It is also possible to think that the U.S. has a responsibility to do something, but that the U.S. should not fulfill that responsibility. Finally, "doing something" is ambiguous, and does not necessarily mean "intervention" as asserted in the reporting of the poll by the New York Times. The biases are countervailing, and lead to ambiguity. The ambiguity of the question is clear when examining the large number of Don't Know (DK) and No Answer (NA) responses. Tellingly, an aggregated 14% of respondents answered either DK or NA. The mean aggregated DK/NA response for all other 25 questions (some repeated over multiple waves across time) was only 4.8% (2.2% sample standard deviation). This indicates that compared with other better-worded questions, an additional 9.2% of respondents on the Syria question were coded as DK/NA.
The question should be reworded for future polls as simply, "Should the US intervene militarily to stop the fighting between government forces and anti-government groups in Syria?"
attacking other countries means sharing their food stamps
The average american are homeless and hungry catching their asses in the land of plenty whilst their "govt" pours billions at the zionist regime.
Since the economy, jobs, and deficits seem to be at the top of the list for concerns for those polled, how about this for a question…
"Should the US spend billions of taxpayer dollars to interfere in the civil war in Syria instead of paying down the deficit, creating jobs and training for those jobs, and setting the economy back on the right track?"
I mean, if you're going to load questions to get the results you want, friggin' load them. But, that's just this old Curmudgeon's opinion…
The main lesson Americans are figureing out after over a decade of for-greedy-profit wars is that it doesn't work and is so counter-productive that it accomplishes the opposite of war's objectives. Americans are sick of watching wars fought for the other side to hand secular countries over to Un-American Islamic extreemists. We've had war rubbed in our faces as a solution and been told we love it, but what we really collectively realize is that war is destroying this country from within from delapodated infrastructure, tax-hikes, and misplaced spending priorities trying to clog a war-toilet all the way to the collective Constitutional soul we are supposed to as a people protect and defend.
Lets call it isolationism. Like that's a bad word in todays world. It just means no more effing wars.