Say Anything Blog

All we hear from the left is “The Iraqis were better off under Saddam.”  “We never should have invaded.”  “We’ve made a mess of Iraq.”  “The Iraqi people are suffering, and it’s America’s fault.”  Yet it looks like the Iraqis themselves are thankful to be out from under Saddam’s boot, and wondering what all this talk about a civil war is about.

DESPITE sectarian slaughter, ethnic cleansing and suicide bombs, an opinion poll conducted on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq has found a striking resilience and optimism among the inhabitants.

The poll, the biggest since coalition troops entered Iraq on March 20, 2003, shows that by a majority of two to one, Iraqis prefer the current leadership to Saddam Hussein’s regime, regardless of the security crisis and a lack of public services.

The survey, published today, also reveals that contrary to the views of many western analysts, most Iraqis do not believe they are embroiled in a civil war.

Officials in Washington and London are likely to be buoyed by the poll conducted by Opinion Research Business (ORB), a respected British market research company that funded its own survey of 5,019 Iraqis over the age of 18.

Here are the actual numbers:

Yet 49% of those questioned preferred life under Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, to living under Saddam. Only 26% said things had been better in Saddam’s era, while 16% said the two leaders were as bad as each other and the rest did not know or refused to answer.

Not surprisingly, the divisions in Iraqi society were reflected in statistics — Sunnis were more likely to back the previous Ba’athist regime (51%) while the Shi’ites (66%) preferred the Maliki government. . . .

The poll suggests a significant increase in support for Maliki. A survey conducted by ORB in September last year found that only 29% of Iraqis had a favourable opinion of the prime minister.

Another surprise was that only 27% believed they were caught up in a civil war. Again, that number divided along religious lines, with 41% of Sunnis believing Iraq was in a civil war, compared with only 15% of Shi’ites.

To sum up, a plurality of Iraqis prefer life in Iraq now to life in Iraq under Saddam even with Baathist Sunnis pining for the good old days of dominance and “most favored” status under that tyrant skewing the results.  A big majority of Iraqis don’t think there’s a civil war on, recognizing (as we all should) that there are really only two sides in Iraq: Those that would engage in the government and internationally sponsored terrorist agents who would topple the government and replace it with an cruel, oppressive regime.  Finally, it also seems as though confidence in Prime Minister Maliki is up as well, something that is likely due to his US-backed crack down on Shiite militia groups and Mouqtada al-Sadr specifically.

Does all this mean that things are peachy in Iraq?  Of course not, but it does illustrate the absurdity of saying that we have made no progress in Iraq and that the mission there is not worth finishing.  We have made progress.  Iraqis realize that their lives are better, and they also recognize that the situation in their country is nowhere near as hopeless as certain blinkered partisans here in the United States would have the world believe.

Update: Don Surber notes that a recent poll of Americans indicates that some 70% of folks here at home believe there’s a civil war in Iraq, and then gets off this line:

I guess the American leftist media forgot to tell the Iraqis that Iraq is having a civil war.

Either that or Iraqis are all watching Fox.

Indeed.