There have been a lot of retrospective pieces about the Iraq war the past few weeks (before they were overtaken by commentaries about Margaret Thatcher), but Ole R. Holsti, the George V. Allen Professor of Political Science (Emeritus) at Duke University, has been looking at American attitudes on the Iraq war for quite a while. … In polls from 2004-2009 self-identified Republican respondents were generally 50 to 60 percentage points more favorable than Democrats when asked if going to war was the right thing to do and was worth the cost. Holsti noted that such a wide partisan gap was “unprecedented in the history of polling on American foreign policy.”
A few years later, the 2012 Chicago Council Survey found that Americans of all political stripes were generally pessimistic about the benefits of the Iraq conflict. But partisan divisions were still apparent, with some key differences in degree – though not as high as 50 to 60 percent differences mentioned above. [cont.]
Dina Smeltz & Craig Kafura, Chicago Council on Global Affairs
Recent polls: Iraq