Dana Milbank - US Faces Long Stay In Iraq as Support Weakens at Home

Americans' Faith in Postwar Success Fading

President Bush acknowledged yesterday that the United States faces a "massive and long-term undertaking" in Iraq, but said U.S. troops would prevail.

At least 31 U.S. and British military personnel have been killed and 178 wounded in combat in Iraq in the nine weeks since Bush announced that major combat operations had ended.

Amid reports of lawlessness and anti-U.S. violence in Iraq, Americans have begun to show ambivalence about the mission. In a Gallup poll for USA Today and CNN, only slim majorities of 56 percent thought that the postwar situation was going well and that the war was worthwhile, while Americans were split on whether the United States would be able to kill or capture Hussein, find weapons of mass destruction, establish democracy and stop attacks on U.S. soldiers.

As part of the justification for the war in Iraq, Bush and his lieutenants described ongoing ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. A still-classified national intelligence report from that time, however, raised doubts about those ties, intelligence officials have said.

According to a poll released yesterday by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes, 71 percent said they believed that the Bush administration implied that Hussein was involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, while 25 percent believed, incorrectly, that Iraq was directly involved in the attacks.

Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said last week that the U.S. presence in Iraq would be necessary for "at least five years" and criticized Bush's rhetoric. "This idea that we will be in just as long as we need to and not a day more -- we've got to get over that rhetoric," he said. "It is rubbish. We're going to be there a long time. We must reorganize our military to be there a long time."