No need for the apology...I have yet to see many polls in the media that are clear on this. General support for military action always floats around 60 percent, but these numbers often drop when the pollsters add various qualifications to that, usually involving foreign disapproval or something awful happening if we go to war.

Unfortunately, it is damn hard to find out what the actual questions on many news polls are, so I can't judge whether the qualifier questions are loaded or not, and it's hard to tell what's really going on. It seems to me that news stories on these polls are being twisted to avoid communicating the conclusion that most Americans are for an invasion of Iraq.

It is almost impossible to judge the validity of a poll without seeing the actual questions. I have been polled myself, and it is usually immediately obvious when a poll is "weighted" to get a desired result, like questions that limit your answers to their choices, or other ways of setting up questions so that either the answer they want or a stupid answer are your only choices.

On top of that, the media cherry-pick the results and headline the ones that push their agenda (anti-war, anti-Bush). Look at the headline wording of two of the articles you linked to:

Poll Finds Most in U.S. Support Delaying a War



Poll: Public Wants U.N. Backing For War



In both polls, a majority support the war in general, but this is never headlined.

Some more searching on the Gallup site revealed this, which is probably the most informative set of data I have seen yet, and actually includes the questions. Will be looking at it in more detail later.