Skepticism About U.S. Deep, Iraq Poll Shows

Motive for Invasion Is Focus of Doubts

More than half of Baghdad's residents said they did not believe the United States would allow the Iraqi people to fashion their political future without the direct influence of Washington, according to a Gallup poll.

....Three-quarters of those polled said they believed the policies and decisions of the Iraqi Governing Council -- whose members were appointed in July by Coalition Provisional Authority Administrator L. Paul Bremer -- were "mostly determined by the coalition's own authorities," and only 16 percent thought the council members were "fairly independent."

...Forty-three percent of the respondents said they believed that U.S. and British forces invaded in March primarily "to rob Iraq's oil." While 37 percent believed the United States acted to get rid of the Hussein regime, only 5 percent thought it did so "to assist the Iraq people," the poll found.

...Almost everyone interviewed -- 94 percent -- said Baghdad "now is a more dangerous place than before the invasion," and 86 percent said that for the previous four weeks "they or a member of their household had been afraid to go outside their home at night for safety reasons," Burkholder said in his analysis. He noted that in the two months before the U.S. invasion, only 8 percent said they had experienced a similar fear....

--Washington Post