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Per an ABC/BBC poll of Iraqis reported earlier this month, 70% of Shiites somewhat or strongly agree that it was right "that U.S.-led coalition forces invaded Iraq in spring 2003" - versus just 2% of Sunnis!
68% of Shiites believe that the current national government of Iraq has done a very good or quite good job of carrying out its responsibilities - versus just 6% of Sunnis.
94% of Sunnis find "attacks on coalition forces" to be acceptable, versus 35% of Shiites.
In all three statistics quoted, it's about 70% of the Shiites who are pro-Democracy and support the new government - and less than 10% of the Sunnis who do so.
This supports my previous post, "It’s Not A 'Civil War' In Iraq, It’s The Wrap-Up Of The Same War We Initiated When We Toppled Saddam," with the addition of providing the means of estimating the size of the minority of Shiites who are not on the side of Democracy. We can also estimate the proportion of the total Iraqi population that opposes Democracy.
As pointed out by HotAir, the ABC/BBC poll appears to oversample Sunnis. 35% of the ABC/BBC poll sample are Sunni Arabs, but GlobalSecurity.org estimates that the total Iraqi population is 12-15% Sunni Arabs. StrategyPage estimates that 20% or fewer of the total Iraqi population are Sunni Arabs:
..the 2003 invasion put the ruling class, largely composed of Sunni Arabs, out of power.
...The Sunni Arab domination of the government and economy IS the problem. Saddam's main job was to see that it stayed that way. So, since 2003, the Shia Arab replacements have been climbing a steep learning curve. It has not been pretty, especially when you throw in all the corruption.
...Most of the violence initially came from Sunni Arabs, led by military officers and secret police officials who wanted their jobs, and privileges, back. The Sunni Arabs have a high opinion of themselves, which is somewhat justified by their high educational and skill levels. The Sunni Arabs also realize that the majority of Iraqis (60 percent of the population is Shia and 20 percent Kurdish) hate them. That majority is also hungry for revenge. Saddam's thugs (the word fits very well here) got increasingly sadistic and brutal during Saddam's 30 year reign.
It is not uncommon for a poll sample to over-represent a demographic group. The industry-standard way to correct for this (and I note this as a professional market researcher) is to weight the data. This means that every respondent in the study is multiplied by a constant such that his or her response counts as somewhat more or less than one single response, the result being that the proportions of all demographic groups in the final weighted sample are equivalent to their actual estimated proportions in the real world. Astonishingly, that does not appear to have been done in the ABC/BBC poll report. Complete study results are presented on pages 14 to 38 of the report. Page 37 shows that 35% of respondents consider themselves Sunni Arabs, which appears to indicate oversampling as per the data from StrategyPage and GlobalSecurity.org noted above; and to indicate that the oversampling was not corrected via weighting of the data.
Oversampling is not considered to bias the results within the oversampled group. Therefore we can weight the data ourselves at this time for individual tables. In the following table, the "% of Population" column shows the estimated proportion of each group, per GlobalSecurity. The next column ( "% of the Religious Group" ) is taken directly from the ABC/BBC poll. The final column ( "As a % of Total Iraqi Population" ) is derived by multiplying the first two columns together for each row.
Source for population data: GlobalSecurity.org.
Source for Attitudinal data: ABC/BBC poll of Iraqis, March 2007.
via HotAir.
This analysis indicates that 36% of the Iraqi population finds attacks on coalition forces to be acceptable. This is a substantial percentage, but it's far less that the 51% which appears to have been erroneously reported on page 6 of the ABC/BBC report. Taken with the other data quoted above, it shows that the great majority of Iraqis support Democracy.
And it shows that this is not a civil war - it's a the wrap-up of the same war we initiated when we toppled Saddam - a war to bring freedom and Democracy to Iraq, and in that way to introduce it into the heart of the Mid-East.
