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How Are We Doing?What Iraqis think of the U.S. occupation.

By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, Oct. 25, 2007, at 8:12 PM ET
Iraqi men. Click image to expand.

Beyond the disputes over whether and why Iraqi and American casualties are up or down (or up and down), the status of the war—specifically, the success or failure of the "surge"—comes down to two issues: security and trust. Do the Iraqi people feel more secure? Do they trust their government, their police, and the U.S. occupation forces?

These are the critical questions in a counterinsurgency campaign, in which the goal is not so much to kill insurgents (though that's part of it) but rather to win the allegiance of the population in order to deny the insurgents support and sanctuary.

The only way to know whether this is succeeding is to ask the Iraqi people. Their answers are not assuring.

It is, of course, hard to gauge popular opinion in a war-torn country while a war is still going on. However, ABC; BBC; NHK; D3 Systems of Vienna, Va.; and KA Research of Istanbul, Turkey; jointly undertook an effort to do so in early March and again in late August of this year. While all such polls have their limits, this one seems as close to truth as we're going to get. (For their methodology, click here.)

Anthony Cordesman, chief military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, summarized the poll's findings in a 51-page report last week. I highly recommend a thorough reading, though its gist can be summarized as follows:

The Iraqis don't much like us or trust us. They see us as more a threat than a protector. Their hostility has, by and large, worsened in recent months. Yet, while the vast majority of Iraqis want the American troops (and their few remaining coalition partners) to leave at some point, most of them don't want us to leave just yet.

Perhaps the poll's most dismaying finding is the dramatic deepening of the Iraqi people's pessimism. In a similar poll taken in November 2005, two-thirds of those surveyed said life was getting better. In March 2007, this figure fell to 35 percent. In August, it dropped further to 29 percent.

Asked about the effect that the surge has had on security in the six months leading up to August, 22 percent of all Iraqis surveyed said the situation had improved, but 30 percent said it had worsened; 42 percent said it had no effect at all. Among Shiites, the figures were roughly the same (30 percent said better, 20 percent said worse, 48 percent said no effect). But for all the talk of a "Sunni awakening," only 7 percent of Sunni Arabs said the surge had improved security, 55 percent said conditions had worsened, and 38 percent said nothing had changed. Even the Kurds, the clearest beneficiaries of America's military presence, were divided between those who thought the surge had made things better (48 percent) and those who thought it made no difference (47 percent). (Just 6 percent of them thought it made things worse.)

More telling still were the results when Iraqis were asked—in March and again in August—whether security conditions were "good" or "bad" in their own neighborhoods. Respondents in four provinces said security had improved—though majorities in all but one province still said conditions were bad. (The highlight here, as might be expected, is Anbar province, where the percentage of those saying security is bad dropped from 100 percent in March to 61 percent in August.) However, in all the other areas, the percentages of those who replied "bad" went up between those two months—and, in most cases, went up sharply.

Compared with the poll last March, the August poll revealed more Iraqis saying they knew of kidnappings and car bombings in their neighborhoods in all parts of the country.

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Fred Kaplan is Slate's "War Stories" columnist and the author of Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power. He can be reached at .
Photograph of Iraqis protesting a U.S. air strike by Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images.
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