WASHINGTON (AP) -- Half of Americans believe Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, but support for sending U.S. troops to remove Saddam Hussein has slipped, according to a poll released Thursday.
The CNN/USA Today poll showed support for deploying troops to Iraq has dropped from 61 percent in June to 53 percent this week.
Four in 10 favor sending troops if it meant they would be in combat there for at least a year, and two in 10 favor sending troops even if the United States received no support from Western allies.
The poll, conducted Monday through Wednesday and having a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points, comes at a time of intensifying debate over what to do about Iraq. A growing number of politicians and foreign affairs experts have spoken out in recent days about whether to invade, and the issue has moved onto the front pages of the nation's newspapers.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer scolded reporters for focusing on Iraq when President Bush met Wednesday with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld at Bush's ranch. Iraq did not come up at the meeting, Bush said.
"It reached an absurd point of self-inflicted silliness that goes beyond the usual August hype," Fleischer said Thursday. "There have been meetings about Iraq in the past, there will be meetings about Iraq in the future. Yesterday's wasn't, and the press didn't care. ... The president's opinion is the press looks silly."
Madeleine Albright, secretary of state under President Clinton, said the debate is vital.
Iraq is "not a direct threat to the United States, which is why, I think, we need to have a discussion about whether we are, will be or would be better off with an attack or a pre-emptive attack on Iraq from where we are now," she said Thursday on the PBS program "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer."
"I believe that Iraq and Saddam Hussein are contained pretty well within this sanctions box," she said.
Henry Kissinger, secretary of state under Presidents Nixon and Ford, said Iraq "threatens the United States by its capacity to threaten its neighbors."
Allies have shown little interest in backing military action against Iraq.
Earlier Thursday, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Trubnikov called the idea of an attack on Iraq "unacceptable," and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said his government's policy was to pressure Saddam into allowing the resumption of U.N. weapons inspections. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has said he would not send troops to what he called an "adventure" in Iraq.
Kissinger blamed the reluctance on political pressures inside those nations.
"Several of these countries are having elections in Europe. Several of these countries have center-left governments in which the debate about how to deal with the United States has been endemic," Kissinger said on PBS.
"At the end of the day, once there is a clear American decision, I believe most Europeans will ask themselves whether they can really afford to separate on a matter of vital security interests of the United States from the country that has been assuring their vital security interests for 50 years."
