Military Families Question Iraq War as Support for Bush Slips

[tekisui]

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=a9eBP4ZM28G8

Dec. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Kent Fletcher, an Iraq war veteran, says he enthusiastically voted for President George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. Now, he is a registered Democrat who questions the need for the war, the way it has been managed and the treatment of returning veterans.

``Saddam Hussein wasn't a threat and the culmination of my career was that war and it wasn't necessary,'' says Fletcher, 32, a financial analyst in Bluffton, South Carolina, who served almost 10 years as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps.

A Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll shows that Fletcher's skepticism about the war reflects a growing disenchantment within the broader military community, long a bastion of support for the Bush administration and Republicans. Among active-duty military, veterans and their families, only 36 percent say it was worth going to war in Iraq. This compares with an Annenberg survey taken in 2004, one year after the invasion, which showed that 64 percent of service members and their families supported the war.

The views of veterans and their families are now closer in line with overall public sentiment. The poll shows that 32 percent of the general population supports the war.

The change isn't ``surprising,'' says Andrew Bacevich, a former Army colonel and professor of international relations at Boston University whose son was killed in Iraq in May. ``Military families have been asked to make enormous sacrifices.''

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When chimpy loses the military, the Occupation will end. It will take soldiers refusing to go, and when they finally do refuse it will probably be under a Democratic President.

[gratuitous]

1. Chimpy may lose the military

But he'll always have the courtiers, sycophants and toadies in the popular media to prop him up and argue for the "success" of his reckless, wasteful policies.