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World wants Iraq occupation to end

LONDON: Despite a consistently high anti-war sentiment among Indians, curiously India is not among the countries where the majority of people want the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq to end within a year, according to a BBC World Service poll of 23,000 people across 22 countries.

Kenya and the Philippines are the only other two countries where there is no majority support for a withdrawal of coalition forces within a year.

At the same time, however, in none of these three countries, a majority favours the U.S. view that foreign troops should remain in Iraq until the security situation there improves.

In India, just 17 per cent favour this option while in Kenya 45 per cent and the Philippines 44 per cent do so.

The poll shows that 67 per cent people in 19 of the 22 countries, where the survey was done, want the coalition troops to withdraw in a year’s time. They include 24 per cent who want an immediate withdrawal. Three in five Americans (61 per cent) think U.S. forces should get out of Iraq within a year while in Britain this view is shared by 65 per cent.

Muslim countries are among the most eager for immediate withdrawal with Indonesia leading the table at 65 per cent followed by Turkey (64 per cent), and Egypt (58 per cent). In Latin American also the opinion in favour of immediate pull-out is significantly high.

The BBC said the support for a “definite” end to the presence of foreign forces in Iraq had grown since a similar poll was done in February 2006.

Doug Miller, president of GlobeScan which conducted the survey, said: “The weight of global public opinion, and indeed American opinion, is opposed to the Bush Administration’s current policy of letting security conditions in Iraq dictate the timing of U.S. troop withdrawal.”

Meanwhile, in Britain despite the new Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s more softly, softly approach to Iraq compared to his predecessor Tony Blair’s aggressive stance he has not been able to win over public opinion on the issue.

According to a separate BBC survey telecast after Sunday’s withdrawal of 550 more U.K. troops from Basra city an overwhelming majority of Britons believe that the British mission in Iraq is set to fail. The poll, conducted for BBC’s Newsnight programme, revealed that more than two-thirds of the British public believed that U.K. troops were “losing the war”. A whopping 52 per cent thought that a victory was “impossible.”

“The poll indicated support for an immediate withdrawal of forces — with 42 per cent saying Gordon Brown should take all of Britain’s troops out of Iraq as soon as possible,” the BBC said.

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