WASHINGTON, September 4 (RIA Novosti) – As the White House tries to make its case to Congress for a military strike against the government of Syria, a number of recent US opinion polls indicate the American public isn’t buying it.
At least four separate polls conducted in the last 10 days all find Americans widely oppose the US intervention President Barack Obama is pushing for in Syria, including the two most recent polls – released Tuesday – by The Washington Post and ABC News and the Pew Research Center.
A brutal civil war has been underway in Syria since 2011 that has left more than 100,000 people dead according to UN estimates. An alleged chemical weapons attack on civilians last month killed more than 1,400 people, according to a US intelligence report, which also finds evidence the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad was behind the attack.
“The United States says it has determined that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons in the civil war there. Given this, do you support or oppose the United States launching missile strikes against the Syrian government?” asked The Washington Post/ABC poll.
Of the 1,012 people polled between Aug. 28 and Sept. 1, 59 percent said they oppose a strike, while 36 percent said they favored it.
Those figures flip-flop the results of a similar Washington Post/ABC poll taken in December, long before the alleged chemical weapons attack occurred. In the earlier survey, 63 percent of those surveyed said they would support US military involvement in Syria if the Assad government used chemical weapons against its own people, while just 30 percent said they would oppose such involvement.
Combined, the four most recent polls – including a survey from NBC News and another from the Huffington Post/YouGov – show anywhere from 41 percent to 59 percent of those surveyed oppose a US military strike, while just 25 percent to 42 percent favor such action.
