USA: According to a poll conducted by Axios/Ipsos this week and released two decades after the US invaded Iraq, the majority of Americans believe the war was a mistake. While 61% of Americans now think the military action was the wrong choice, only 2/3 of Americans in 2003 approved of it.
Just 26% of those surveyed by Pew opposed using military force to topple Saddam Hussein's regime before the US invasion of Iraq on ground forces began on March 20, 2003.
Political affiliation greatly influenced the level of support; 83% of Republicans and 52% of Democrats supported the invasion. Twenty years later, that gap still exists, with a much smaller majority of Republicans (58%) still arguing that the US was justified in its invasion. Democratic voters only hold this opinion to a 26% level today.
According to a recent Ipsos poll of 1,018 adults over the age of 18, the majority of Americans (67%) do not believe that the war in Iraq has made the US any safer.
However, about 75% of Americans said they want the US to continue being a "global leader," and 54% think that Washington's overall "focus" on homeland security and national defence over the past 20 years has made the US safer.
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Initially, the media and the George W. Bush administration made false claims about Iraq's WMDs, which served as the foundation for a large portion of the initial support for the war.
Even though Hussein was never directly implicated in the 9/11 terrorist attacks by the Bush administration, 57% of respondents to a 2003 Pew poll agreed with this assertion.
In regards to the war, approximately 44% of respondents are still undecided as to who was 'right': those who 'totally' supported it, those who opposed it from the beginning, or those who later changed their minds.
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The democratic paradise that Bush famously proclaimed "Mission Accomplished" back in 2003 was a far cry from the Iraq of today. According to the Iraq Body Count project, at least 210,000 civilians died as a result of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Following the partial US pullout in 2011, Iraq descended into instability, the nation grew to be a haven for jihadism, and a large portion of its northern regions came under the control of terrorists from the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS).
Three years after the Iraqi government ordered them to leave, there are still about 2,500 US troops stationed there. Data from the Pentagon from 2019 show that 4,487 American service members died in total during the Iraqi war.
