Most people now feel that the conflict rendered the US less safe twenty years after the invasion, which has caused public opinion about it to change.
According to a study conducted by Axios/Ipsos this week and released two decades after the US invaded Iraq, the majority of Americans believe the war was a mistake. The military intervention was supported by two-thirds of Americans in 2003, but 61% today think it was the wrong choice.
Only 26% of those surveyed by Pew opposed using military force to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime before the US invasion of Iraq on ground forces began on March 20, 2003.
Political identity significantly affected support, with 83% of Republicans and 52% of Democrats backing invasion. Twenty years later, the gap still exists, with a considerably smaller majority of Republicans (58%) still arguing that the US was justified in its invasion. Democratic voters only hold this opinion at a 26% level now.
According to the Ipsos survey, which was conducted last week among 1,018 Americans over the age of 18, the majority of Americans (67%) do not feel that the war in Iraq has made the US any safer.
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Although 54% of Americans say Washington’s “emphasis” on homeland security and national defence during the past 20 years has made the US safer, over three-quarters of Americans indicated they want the US to continue being a “global leader”.
The media, which repeated fanciful assertions about Iraqi WMD, and the Bush administration’s bogus claims about the country’s weapons of mass destruction provided a significant portion of the initial support for the war. According to 57% of respondents to a 2003 Pew poll, the Bush administration never clearly informed Americans that Hussein had contributed to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The answer to the question of who was “correct” about the war – those who “completely” backed it, those who opposed it from the beginning, or those who gradually altered their thoughts – is still up for debate with 44% of respondents.
The democratic utopia that Bush infamously called “Mission Accomplished” back in 2003 was a long cry from the modern-day Iraq that its people were promised. According to the Iraq Body Count project, the invasion of Iraq and the ensuing occupation resulted in the deaths of at least 210,000 people.
Following the partial American exit in 2011, the nation descended into chaos, became a haven for jihadism, and a large portion of northern Iraq was seized by terrorists from the Islamic State (IS, previously ISIS). Three years after the Iraqi government ordered the US soldiers to depart, there are still around 2,500 of them there. The overall number of US military members that died in the Iraqi war was 4,487, according to Pentagon figures from 2019.
