Can Democrats Seize On How Much Everyone Hates Trump's Iran War?
One, of course, is the if that goes with everything involved with the race: If there is a fair election. The if specific to the hoped-for silver lining is if there is a candidate willing and able to make use of it.
Ever since Gallup started public opinion polls, when it has come to questions of war, they've shown the American public favoring every one at the start-until now, with Donald Trump launching the first war to encounter immediate objection from a majority of the American public.
A man who exults in doing things that no president has ever done before has certainly done it up proud with this one-ending a more than 85-year stretch when the American people gave the government the benefit of the doubt at the beginning of every military action, no matter how much they may have come to regret it later.
Not surprisingly, the Second World War - the first one ever polled - enjoyed the broadest support, with 97% backing the declaration of war following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. And all these years later, World War II is still widely thought of as the“good war.”
Not so much with the war that was the next most broadly supported at the outset - the Afghanistan War then enjoyed 92% support from a population that could never have imagined it dragging on for two decades. Eighty-two percent supported the first George Bush's Iraq War, now remembered as the Gulf War.
And even though Americans would eventually turn against all three of them, the (Second) Iraq War, Korean War and Vietnam War started out with 76%, 75% and 65% support, respectively. (Public polling only on the Vietnam War began in 1965, as America started coming to grips with the fact that we were actually in a war there.)
Much less remembered conflicts that also found initial approval included Bush's 1989 Panama invasion, with 82% favorable; Clinton's 1999 Kosovo War bombing of Yugoslavia, at 58%; and 53% for Reagan's 1983 invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada.
In fact, the only American military operation not enjoying majority support from the start was Obama's 2011 bombing of Libya, favored by only 47%. But even then, only 37% outright opposed it-You others perhaps not even considering us to be at war (a stance that the Administration would subsequently adopt in arguing that it did not qualify as war under the War Powers Act.)
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