Agence France Presse --  Arab News

WASHINGTON, 11 April 2004 — Escalating fighting in Iraq and mounting casualties among US troops have deflated enthusiasm for the war among Americans, who are growing increasingly skeptical about the undertaking, according to a flurry of new opinion polls made public here.

At least three surveys released Friday reflected growing doubts about George W. Bush’s strategy in Iraq and overall lackluster support for his presidency as more and more Americans expressed doubt whether the one-year-old US military campaign in the country will ever bear fruit.

With pictures of dead and wounded soldiers splashed onto television screens, a new Gallup poll found that 64 percent of respondents now believe things in Iraq are going either “very badly” or “moderately badly” for the United States, up from 43 percent who felt that way a month ago.

Just 35 percent thought the situation was evolving either “very well” or “moderately well,” down from 55 percent in March, the survey indicated.

“This is the most negative reading measured by Gallup since the war began last year, even worse than the reading last November before the capture of Saddam Hussein,” commented company analyst David Moore.

The findings are borne out by a survey conducted by CBS News, which has discovered that the rosy optimism about the future of US involvement in Iraq expressed just at the end of last year is rapidly giving way to gloom and doom.

If about two-thirds of those polled by the television network in December said things were going well in Iraq, only 39 percent were able to reaffirm this assessment now.

Nearly six in 10 respondents in the CBS poll agreed that the United States was not doing well in Iraq while 26 percent described the situation as very bad.

Fifty-seven percent said the conflict was not worth the costs, compared to 34 percent who said it was. The share of firm believers in the war dropped five percentage points in just one week.

To be sure, 50 percent of Americans still believe the United States made the right decision to use military force against Iraq last year, the CBS News survey showed.

But the figure is down from 55 percent just last week, while 46 percent now say the Bush administration should have stayed out of Iraq.

A survey by Fox News Opinion Dynamics has produced virtually identical results. It showed backing for the war at 50 percent, down from 65 percent last summer.

Although President Bush’s overall job approval ratings remained static since the beginning of the month at between 49 and 51 percent, experts see this as a bad omen.

They say Bush should have received a clear bounce in the polls from last week’s announcement that the recovering economy had created more than 300,000 new jobs.

Instead, say the experts, the uptick has now been essentially swallowed by Iraq.