(JNi.media) More than 6 in 10 Americans reject the way President Obama is handling the threat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, an Associated Press-GfK poll revealed Thursday. Support for the president in this area has been sliding steadily since the US began its fight against the group in late 2014. As late as last September, Americans were about evenly split on the issue, but disapproval picked up 8 points since January.
The results are part of an overall decline in the public’s trust in Obama’s ability to manage foreign policy, viewed favorably by only 40% of Americans in the AP-GfK poll. They reflect the president’s failure to advance US Middle East policy, most notably his failure to pull the US military out of the region, with three military conflicts—Iraq, Afghanistan and now Syria—still unresolved under his presidency.
The AP-GfK poll was conducted before Obama’s announcement last week that he was sending as many as 50 special forces to northern Syria, getting the US involved on the ground as an ongoing presence for the first time. But even without that alarming factor, the poll results still reflect the growing anxiety of Americans in 2015, about involvement in the Middle East.
About one third of Americans approve of Obama’s decision to keep some 5,500 troops in Afghanistan, instead of pulling nearly the entire US military presence there as had been the plan. One-third opposed and one third were neither in favor nor against. Only 20% said it’s likely or very likely that Afghanistan would have a stable, democratic government after the US leaves. 71 percent predicted history would judge the Afghanistan war as a failure.
The AP-GfK Poll of 1,027 adults was conducted online Oct. 15-19, using a sample drawn from GfK’s probability-based KnowledgePanel, designed to represent the US population. The margin of error for all was plus or minus 3.3%.