Only 28% say a positive assessment will make them more likely to support the war, while the number who say it won't is a staggering seventy two percent.

Public opinion in the U.S. is like a giant ocean-liner. Takes forever to turn it around, and once it starts turning, it's almost impossible to change course.

It doesn't matter what the public thinks. Bush knows better than all the experts. He will do what he wants until his last day in office.

Bush, just like he did, when he shopped around for intelligence reports that would support his war policy, shopped around for generals who would support his Iraq policy, and found one in Petraeus. Do I trust him to give an accurate report on the additional troops he put into Iraq? No way. I voted, in 2006, to send a load and clear message of no confidence. No confidence in this president and his war policy, and no confidence in the Republican majority in Congress. That was the end. No more extensions. No more troops. No more time. I don't care what outcomes they can conjure up for Bush, I'm through, and so is he.

Hector

I find it very discouraging that 43% of the respondents to this question say that they will believe what the report says -- especially in light of recent information that the report is going to be written in the White House with "input" from Petraeus and others. On the other hand, there's this to be thankful for: "Only 28% say a positive assessment will make them more likely to support the war, while the number who say it won't is a staggering seventy two percent."

The "policy" might be that of BushCheney, but Petraeus is executing his own (untested) theories regarding how to conduct a successful counterinsurgency campaign and he has already stated publicly that for such a campaign to succeed would require in the neighborhood of ten years.

Can anyone really believe that Petraeus would pull his own plug in September? Sorry, folks, people like that just don't become generals.

But watch out, the Dems will champion him, whatever he says, because he offers them political cover.

It's not just his association. Petraeus published an op-ed in the Washington Post six weeks before the 2004 election (in which Iraq was a major issue), giving a glowing review of the training of Iraqi forces, which he was then in charge of. As Paul Krugman put it:

I don’t know why the op-ed article that General Petraeus published in The Washington Post on Sept. 26, 2004, hasn’t gotten more attention. After all, it puts to rest any notion that the general stands above politics: I don’t think it’s standard practice for serving military officers to publish opinion pieces that are strikingly helpful to an incumbent, six weeks before a national election.

Personally, one of the things I'm most worried about at this point is that "we won't let Petraeus report directly" is a fake-out by the White House to increase Petraeus' reputation for credibility and independence.

(And that's not even getting into the ludicrousness of having a general evaluate the success of the operation he's in charge of, which his entire career is dependent on the outcome.)

Glenn Greenwald the other day posted quotes from Patreus over the past few years. Time and again Patreus is quoted as telling "we are making progress in Iraq" type nonsense stories that again and again and again turned out to be proven as nonsense.

Patreus has proven himself to be untrustworthy. His own words from past episodes reveal that fact over and over. There is no reason to trust someone to tell the truth on a subject that they have repeatedly not told the truth about.

While this point is unbearably sad, it should be made to provide the proper context: The vast majority of Americans no longer trust what anybody in Washington says about any topic whatsoever. This situation has certainly accellerated during the Bush Administration, but the fact remains an important point of context. Mr. Petraeus' appointment as the official arbiter of progress in Iraq makes him simply another one of the many distrusted folks from Washington. Frankly, it will be an extraordinary problem for anybody in Washington who actually tells the truth, because the "chicken little" effect will take many years to fade.

Assume that Petraeus had a better-than-usual degree of military and political insight into the task he was confronting--an assumption that flows inevitably from the "respect" so many people (even Juan Cole!) have conferred on him. Assume also that he has some qualities of decency and honor that give him a degree of nobility. If so (and the above discussion makes clear it isn't necessarily so), but if so then he's "just" another tragic hero whose pride brought him down. Again assuming his insight, there can be no other explanation for he willingness to accept the assignment. He knew very well it couldn't work but simple arrogance and pride prevented him from acting on that knowledge. (No, there's no sense of duty to obey--for God's sake; a sense of duty would have forced him to tell his commander in chief that this was a fool's errand and he'd resign on principle. It's been done. Duty to country would have required that he save his country from further loss and humiliation.) So, like so many others of arguably less or more virtue than he, Petraeus has been destroyed by this administration. History will condemn him, like all the others, with the verdict of disloyalty and dishonor to his country. Whatever our inclinations about support for the military, we have to grieve the loss of yet another soldier--but in this case a soldier who ended up being complicit in his own, and his nation's, downfall and disaster.

Hector

To RedshiftX

Of course your point is correct and important that those responding to the question of belief in Petraeus's report could not have known that the report was actually being written by the White House. My own sentence was not clear: I did not mean that 43% of respondents said they'd believe the report even though Petraeus would not write it; I meant that however discouraging it would be to have 43% of the respondents believing whatever Petraeus wrote, it was -- at least to me -- even more discouraging that what the White House writes will apparently be believed by 43% of the respondents.