A CNN poll released today reports that nearly 60% of the public favors withdrawing American forces from Iraq by 2008 or sooner:

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Nearly six in 10 Americans want to see U.S. troops leave Iraq either immediately or within a year, and more would rather have Congress running U.S. policy in the conflict than President Bush, according to a CNN poll out Tuesday. Though support for Bush’s decision to dispatch additional troops to Iraq grew to 37 percent — up from 32 percent in a mid-January poll — a slim majority of 52 percent say Congress should block funding for the new deployment. The CNN poll was conducted Friday through Sunday by Opinion Research Corp. Pollsters interviewed 1,027 adults for the survey, which had a sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

If nothing else, this seems to be an indication that the President’s surge has been, at the very least, a political failure given that it has failed to unite the country around the Bush Administration’s central premise, which is that we must stay in Iraq until the job is “done”, whatever that might mean. What will be interesting will be whether these opinions, if they persist into 2008, will have an impact on the Presidential race. Potentially, pro-war candidates like McCain, Giuliani, Romney, and Clinton could suffer setbacks while anti-war candidates like Obama, Hagel (if he runs), and Ron Paul could benefit at the polls.

In either case, it is clear that the Iraq War has lost the support of the public. For that reason alone, I don’t think it will be long before we start hearing real talk of withdrawal.