Lookin' bad - is that good?

You can decide for yourself if the implications of this survey are good news or not. Personally, I think they're very good news. Not unalloyed good news, but still good. (Thanks to Juan Cole.)

According to a Wednesday press release from Public Agenda and Foreign Affairs, their latest survey of public confidence in US foreign policy "provides striking evidence that Americans' anguish over Iraq is spilling over to other areas of foreign policy."

The Spring 2007 Anxiety Indicator stands at 137, well above the neutral mid-point of 100 and a seven point increase since September 2006. "The Anxiety Indicator is moving closer to the 150 mark, the 'red zone' that to me would signal a full blown crisis of public confidence," said Public Agenda Chairman Daniel Yankelovich.

Among the points providing "striking evidence" are these:
- 84% are worried about the way things are going for the US in world affairs
- 82% say the world is becoming more dangerous for the Americans
- 73% say the US is not doing a good job as a leader in creating a better world
- 68% believe the rest of the world sees the US negatively
- 67% say US relations with the rest of the world are on the wrong track

And in what the the report calls the spill-over from Iraq,
- Only 8% (!) support military action against Iran. Indeed, "public support for military solutions in many scenarios is virtually off the table."
- Meanwhile, 31% say the accusation that the US has been too quick to resort to war is "totally" justified and another 39% say it's "partly" justified.
- On how to resist terrorism, more effort on diplomacy beats our more effort on military action by 67%-27%.
- 84% say it's important to "initiate military force only when we have the support of our allies." A majority, 51% call it "very important."

In the short run, such figures are impressive and important. I doubt they mean a whole long in the longer run; we have seem too many times before how people, fed up and distressed with a particular war, begin to critique war in general and the militarism that feeds it (and off which it feeds, in a morbid symbiosis) - only to be stampeded into the next Great Campaign, waving banners (and in our case, yellow ribbons) all the while. I can't help but remember that these same sort of sentiments were being expressed in the same sort of percentages in the last years of Vietnam - but just five years later we were electing Ronald Reagan.

Still, in the short run the numbers matter because they will impact foreign policy in the near future. And to the extent they do, that impact will be a good one.

Public Agenda's discussion of the report and its findings are in a series of linked pages beginning with this one; the full report is available in .pdf format at this link.