WASHINGTON: A record number of Americans are pessimistic about the outcome in Iraq and now believe the war was a mistake, according to a CBS News/New York Times opinion poll out late Thursday.
Seventy-six percent of Americans think the war is going badly, up ten percentage points in one month, according to the poll.
Sixty-one percent of those polled said the United States should have stayed out of Iraq, with only 35 percent saying the invasion was the right thing to do.
Nearly half – 47 percent – of those polled said the war was going very badly, with just 20 percent believing that the recent surge of US troops will make a difference.
And a full 72 percent of those polled said the United States is heading on the wrong track – the highest percentage recorded since the CBS/NYT pollsters first asked the question in 1983.
According to the poll, six in 10 Americans also want a timetable for US troops to withdraw from Iraq – an issue that was dropped from the war funding bill Congress passed late Thursday.
The poll put President George W. Bush s popularity rating at 30 percent, two points up from his January low of 28 percent.
But the war is losing support among Bush s fellow Republicans, with a majority – 52 percent – saying the war is going at least somewhat badly – a 16-point increase from mid-April.
The telephone poll was conducted among 1,125 adults between May 18-23. The margin of error is plus or minus three percentage points.
