The Daily Background

Raw Story reports today that conservative columnist BobNovak believes John McCain’s support for sending more troops to Iraq is hurting him politically:

“The decline in the polls of [McCain], as measured against [Clinton], reflects more than declining Republican popularity nationally in the weeks after the election,” writes Novak in his exclusive report. “It connotes public disenchantment with McCain’s aggressive advocacy of a ’surge’ of up to 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Iraq.

One recent poll shows Clinton — who hasn’t confirmed her intent to run for president yet — pulling ahead of McCain, who recently launched his own exploratory committee website. According to the Newsweek poll, voters with their choices limited to just the pair, prefer Clinton by seven percent (Clinton earned 50% to McCain’s 43%, with 7% opting for “undecided, other”).

McCain’s stance- that up to 30,000 more American soldiers need to be sent to Iraq- is supported by only 11% of the American public according to a poll taken earlier this December. President Bush is expected to announce that he is sending more soldiers to Iraq in January sometime before his January 23 State of the UnionAddress (though he is certainly taking his time making the decision).

None of the Joint Chiefs of Staff believe that a troop surge or escalation will be helpful, and no generals in Iraq have requested more troops, some of them likeCENTCOM commander John Abazaid (who is in charge of all middle eastern operations) have said they believe sending more combat troops to Iraq would merely inflame the situation and result in more US casualties.

Both the Chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services Committee oppose troop surges and have indicated they believe that a troop surge would severelydamage the military which is already far overstretched, with some troops heading to Iraq for their fourth tour of duty in less than four years.

Further, the Associated Press reported today that “Many soldiers say troop surge a bad idea,” and revealed that in almost all of the “dozens” of interviews with US soldiers in Iraq that the news agency conducted recently- the troops thought adding to their numbers would range from a poor choice to adisastrous decision which would only “result in more U.S. casualties.”

You can find a very extensive list of experts (like former Army Chief of Staff and Bush Administration Secretary of State Colin Powell), 2008 Presidential candidates (likeBarack Obama, Hilary Clinton, John Edwards and Joe Biden), and other notable people who oppose pouring more troops into Iraq here. I recently updated our “who opposes troop surges list” with several new entries.

The question remains: if neither the generals, the experts, the politicians or the American public can stop the President from escalating the conflict in Iraq more by sending more troops in- what can?

Filed under: Iraq Related, Z-TDB Blog