Real Clear's Tom Bevan reports:
A new poll of 2,200 Iraqis conducted by ABC News, the BBC, ARD German TV and the Japanese broadcaster NHK shows much improved attitudes across virtually every aspect of life in Iraq - though perhaps especially on the security front.
The numbers are impressive. Twice as many people now expect things to be better in a year as felt that way in August of last year (from 23 to 46 percent). Well over half of Iraqis (62 percent) now describe the security in their neighborhood as "good." And 55 percent (compared to 39 percent in August) describe their own lives as "going well."
I take this with a grain of salt. As John Burns noted in yesterday's Times, "any attempt to measure opinion in Iraq is fatally skewed by intimidation." But, given that the same questions were asked in August, this is just another set of data that contradicts the efforts of domestic critics to paint the surge as a failure. Iraqis appear to see a different result.
