Guess What? War is Unpopular

The initial polling is in on the Iran killing spree, and it ain’t good for the guy who blundered us into it:

Apologies for the NYT link, but YouGov finds the same thing (that’s a link to a G Elliott Morris piece on Iran polling).

Standard polling disclaimers apply (early days, timing, etc). That said, while a few “police action” military strikes might be popular at some times (Grenada was somewhat popular, as I remember, and perhaps the first Gulf War), in general a broad spectrum of Americans hate war. There’s a lot of isolationism in the American character. And people aren’t dumb: they know that even low casualty counts come with a lot of PTSD.

And, since Vietnam, most of the warring has been done by Republicans. Talk about fucking up a ham sandwich after 9/11: going to Afghanistan and hunting down Bin Laden was the biggest no-brainer of all time, and they fucked that up royally by lying us into a totally different quagmire. They paid for their fuckup at the polls, eventually. Hell, we even elected a black President on the back of it.

A healthy party would have ejected every single member who voted for the Iraq War. Instead, we made one of them our leader in the Senate. It isn’t popular to bomb a school full of girls, no matter how Muslim they are. It isn’t popular to kill the daughter and grandchild of the leader of a country. If we’re supposedly doing what’s popular, it’s opposing this war, no matter what bullshit the incredibly unpopular President and his politburo dream up to support it.