The Democrats have been busy making statements about how not only the American public is fed up with Iraq, but so are America’s troops.  Yet it turns out that the only poll done of the troops’ opinions about the war, a Military Times effort much-touted by liberals, doesn’t quite support the left’s contentions.

Almost in passing, Sen. James Webb, Virginia Democrat, dropped what was intended to be a bombshell about the state of the American soldier in Iraq last Tuesday evening as he delivered his response to President Bush’s State of the Union address. Not only do the majority of Americans no longer support the way the war in Iraq is being fought, the terse and pro-withdrawal Mr. Webb told millions of viewers, but now, he said, “the majority of our military” also does not support the war.

The first half of that statement is true; poll after poll shows that the public now opposes the war in Iraq. But the latter half is at best a contortion of the evidence and quite possibly the opposite of the truth. The question of military support for the president’s war policies is a fascinating one, not least because service members are the people with the best firsthand knowledge of the war’s day-to-day conduct. They should know better than others what has worked and what hasn’t, what is likely to succeed and what isn’t. As befits a political speech delivered for high political effect, Mr. Webb has not done the subject justice.

The only non-anecdotal publicly available evidence for Mr. Webb’s case is a December poll of Military Times readers which shows that only 35 percent of readers support the president’s handling of the war, as opposed to 42 percent opposed. That’s down from 63 percent in favor in 2004 (in a poll which the editors stress “should not be read as representative of the military as a whole"). Interestingly, though, the seeming anti-war majority consists at least in part of people who think that President Bush has not been aggressive enough. Nearly half of this December poll’s respondents thought that the United States needed more troops in Iraq. That’s nearly half who want a deeper American commitment, not a withdrawal. How ironic for Mr. Webb, who tried to claim the troops for his own pro-withdrawal platform last week.

So yeah, the Military Times poll indicates that the troops don’t necessarily agree with the President’s policies in Iraq.  But a lot of them disagree with it not because they think we can’t win or that we should give up and withdraw (as the Dems would suggest) but rather because they feel we aren’t committed enough in Iraq.

Which is pretty much the polar opposite of the Democrat position.

Shame on Webb and the Democrats for this blatant, and clearly knowing misrepresentation.