And The Polling Says: No War With Iran!

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Here's the latest poll on military action against Iran:

"If the U.S. government decides to take military action in Iran, would you favor or oppose it?"

Favor - 26%
Oppose - 68%
Unsure - 6%

According to an October poll, you can get 38% to support military action if you just talk about air strikes, with 54% against. Only 18% are crazy enough to go for a ground war, with a whopping 76% opposed.

The upshot of this is that Democrats don't need to be afraid of opposing military action against Iran. This is an issue where we have the advantage. Of course, if the Bush Administration successfully foments some kind of crisis, these numbers could change. But there's something that Democrats can do to head off that sort of possibility. If the case is made powerfully to the American people that this is a situation where good diplomacy will be successful, that war won't solve the major problems, and that any crisis will represent an abject failure of diplomacy by the Bush administration, the path through crisis to war becomes much more difficult. I'd really like to see John Edwards say what he said to Ezra more often. Let me post the portion of Edwards' first answer that Ezra didn't quote in his post here:

Number one, you have a radical leader, Ahmadinejad, who is politically unstable in his own country. The political elite have begun to leave him, the religious leaders have begun to leave him, the people aren’t happy with him, for at least two reasons: one, they don’t like his sort of bellicose rhetoric, and second, he was elected on a platform of economic reform and helping the poor and the middle class, and he hasn’t done anything. In fact, while he was traveling, the leaders of the legislature sent him a letter saying, ‘when are you gonna pay attention to the economic problems of our country.’ So, I think we have an opportunity here that we need to be taking advantage of.

First, America should be negotiating directly with Iran, which Bush won’t do. Second, we need to get our European friends, not just the banking system, but the governments themselves, to help us do two things -- put a group, a system of carrots and sticks on the table. The carrots are, we’ll make nuclear fuel available to you, we’ll control the cycle, but you can use it for any civilian purpose. Second, an economic package, which I don’t think has been seriously proposed up until now. Because there economy is already struggling, and it would be very attractive to them. And then on the flip side, the stick side, to say if you don’t do that, there are going to be more serious economic sanctions than you’ve seen up until now. Now of course we need the Europeans for this, cause they’re the ones with the economic relationship with Iran, but the whole purpose of this is number one to get an agreement. Number two, to isolate this radical leader so that the moderates and those within the country who want to see Iran succeed economically, can take advantage of it.