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'Public opposition to the war in Afghanistan has hit a new high and is now well above even opposition to the war in Vietnam, according to a new poll.
The CNN/Opinion Research poll shows just 17 percent of Americans support the effort, while 82 percent oppose it.
The eight in 10 Americans who oppose the war is higher than any other recent conflict. As CNN notes, during the Iraq and Vietnam wars, opposition never peaked above seven in 10 Americans.
More recent polling, from March, shows 57 percent of Americans say it was a mistake to send troops into Vietnam.
During the Vietnam War, there were violent protests during both Democrat and Republican administrations.
Where are the protests for the War on Terror now?
Oh yeah, they stopped on January 20, 2009.
Bush started these trillion dollar wars, and the current do-nothing prez still has one going, but the trillion that could have perhaps been used for our own problems, ie, DETROIT, has been wisely spent doing really, really necessary work elsewhere in the world... right?
Yet another reason that the notion that "the government is us" is baloney. If the government truly was a reflection of the American people, all the troops would have been withdrawn from Afghanistan years ago, among other things.
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Originally Posted by KRAMERCAT
Bush started these trillion dollar wars, and the current do-nothing prez still has one going, but the trillion that could have perhaps been used for our own problems, ie, DETROIT, has been wisely spent doing really, really necessary work elsewhere in the world... right?
I second this. Just imagine the miles of roads that could have been repaired, the miles of urban freeways that could have been put underground, the high-speed rail lines that could have been built, the power lines that could have been put underground, the housing that could have been built, the schools that could have been repaired, the urban renewal that could have been funded, and the power plants that could have been built for those trillions of dollars that were instead spent on purposeless death and destruction of foreign countries and their people. Or, as Eisenhower put it (source):
Quote:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
Somewhat inspired by this, one of my favorite ways to measure government spending is Big Digs. Simply put, taking a government spending figure and dividing it by the cost of the Big Dig's transportation component (roughly $10 billion). It really puts the opportunity cost of government spending in perspective.
The best estimates for the total (direct and indirect) cost of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan come in at roughly $3-4 trillion, which comes to 300-400 Big Digs worth. That's a ton of money.
'Public opposition to the war in Afghanistan has hit a new high and is now well above even opposition to the war in Vietnam, according to a new poll.
The CNN/Opinion Research poll shows just 17 percent of Americans support the effort, while 82 percent oppose it.
The eight in 10 Americans who oppose the war is higher than any other recent conflict. As CNN notes, during the Iraq and Vietnam wars, opposition never peaked above seven in 10 Americans.
More recent polling, from March, shows 57 percent of Americans say it was a mistake to send troops into Vietnam.
Although I didn't live in the Vietnam War Era, I just cannot believe that Afghanistan is more unpopular than Vietnam; I mean, Vietnam is a war that we know we lost, Afghanistan is a war that seems rather unknown to is in comparison to Iraq. Now Iraq I could believe is very unpopular in contrast to Vietnam, but Afganistan just isn't all that popular enough to even get the recognition to become unpopular if that makes any sense.
Bush waved the Saudi 'terrorists' in, and let the Bin Laden family be the first to fly after 9-11. Coincidence? He wanted them to succeed. They were trained to fly, but not take off or land, at a CIA-sponsored air strip. The bombs planted in the towers were what brought them down, controlled demolitions. This was the darkest chapter in American history, and will be recognized as such one day when all the the facts are revealed.
[quote=JohnnyMack;32844242]How many boys just out of HS are being drafted to go to Afghanistan? How many people are marching in the streets protesting the Afghanistan war?[/quote]
Agreed. What's really changed is that Liberals used to protest wars & were very active in protesting Viet Nam. The Democratic party has morphed into Progressives who now support war. Afghanistan, the continued occupation of Iraq, Libya, Syria, even the idea of attacking Iran. As long as their President is attacking there is no war they won't support.
Why would we attack Iraq over 9/11? We should have attacked Saudi Arabia is anyone, that's who attacked us.
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