[Peace-discuss] more on poll

[Ricky Baldwin]

No, I didn't mean to write "moron poll"...

Disturbed as we were to hear Carl's report at the
meeting tonight on the Washington Post poll showing
that 69 percent of Americans supposedly still believe
Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9-11, I
decided to see what I could find out quickly.  

Now, others with superior search skills may find the
juicy specifics on how the poll was conducted, etc.  I
didn't really, but what I found may still be useful
for a few letters to the editor for the News-Gazette,
where a shortened - and worsened - version appeared
today.

At the end of this, you'll find the Washington Post
article on their own poll.  But first:

AFP, AP and others reported yseterday that it was a
poll of 1,003 adults with a margin of error of plus or
minus 3 percent (not bad).

Deseret News (Salt Lake City) and the Washington Post
itself reported the numbers as 62 percent of
Democrats, 67 percent of independents and 80 percent
of Republicans saying they believe in the link.

AP Worldstream added that the Time/CNN poll mentioned
in the News-Gazette -- showing that 71 percent
Americans think "the United States has done a good job
in Iraq since the end of major fighting" -- also found
that 43 percent said the military action in Iraq "was
not worth the cost in American lives", 8 percent
weren't sure, and 49 percent said it was worth it. 
This poll also had a margin of rror, by the way, of
3.1 percent, meaning the yesses and nos could both
have
been 46 percent, for all the pollsters know.  They
also noted Bush's approval rating down to 52 percent,
from 63 percent in May.

But most interesting of all, in my book, NBC News
reported the WP poll's 69 percent for linkage this
way: 32 percent said it is "very likely" that saddam
was personally involved, while 37 percent said it was
"somewhat likely".  Hmm - could the choices have been
"very likely"/"somewhat likely"/"not likely"?  Hmmm. 
And what do you know, the responses seem clumped
around the middle choice, just like every other test
question with 3  (or 5) possibilities.  It's purely a
coincidence, of course, that 2 out of 3 choices are
considered "yes".  The pollsters couldn't have
intended to skew the results in any way.  I don't know
how many choices there were, of course, since none of
these sources actually tell you what the questions
were so you can see for yourself whether there is a
bias - but I see it this way: most news sources I
found already misled us by implying that there were
only two choices - Saddam was involved or he wasn't -
now it seems there were at least three, and the
results are getting shaky (I think).  If there were
more questions they failed to mention, and
oversimplified the results even more, well, that's
even more misleading.

None of the above was mentioned in the News-Gazette
today.  Nor did the NG devote the space that the WP
did (as you can see below) puzzling over why Americans
still believe this (assuming they do) and discussing
it as a "fuzz" in Americans' thinking.  Whoa!  How'd
they decide to cut that word out, d'ya think?

This "gut feeling" that those polled couldn't seem to
explain (see below) seems to partly overt suggestion
from US officials (examples below) but also a little
racism mixed in (the suggestion below that some people
link Saddam and the 9-11 terrorists because they
are/were all Middle Eastern.  Nobody said, "They all
look alike," but almost.  

The WP story also makes a very important point that I
think is correct and we should take note: this
explains why so many Americans support the war in Iraq
even though it has gone very badly.  This suggests
that we need to focus more attention on this one
particular myth, and maybe less on the others.  Just a
thought.  Anyway.

See?  There is hope that Americans aren't as fascistic
as we sometimes seem.  There is also hope for a few
good letters to the editor on this.  I'll work on
mine.  If anyone wants help or wants to work together,
just email me individually.

Here's the WP story on the poll:

The Washington Post

September 06, 2003, Saturday, Final Edition

SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. A01

LENGTH: 1587 words

HEADLINE: Hussein Link to 9/11 Lingers in Many Minds

BYLINE: Dana Milbank and Claudia Deane, Washington
Post Staff Writers

BODY:
Nearing the second anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks, seven in 10 Americans continue to
believe that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had a role in the
attacks, even though the Bush administration and
congressional investigators say they have no evidence
of this.

Sixty-nine percent of Americans said they thought it
at least likely that Hussein was involved in the
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
according to the latest Washington Post poll. That
impression, which exists despite the fact that the
hijackers were mostly Saudi nationals acting for al
Qaeda, is broadly shared by Democrats, Republicans and
independents.

The main reason for the endurance of the apparently
groundless belief, experts in public opinion say, is a
deep and enduring distrust of Hussein that makes him a
likely suspect in anything related to Middle East
violence. "It's very easy to picture Saddam as a
demon," said John Mueller, a political scientist at
Ohio State University and an expert on public opinion
and war. "You get a general fuzz going around: People
know they don't like al Qaeda, they are horrified by
September 11th, they know this guy is a bad guy, and
it's not hard to put those things together." 

Although that belief came without prompting from
Washington, Democrats and some independent experts say
Bush exploited the apparent misconception by implying
a link between Hussein and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks
in the months before the war with Iraq. "The notion
was reinforced by these hints, the discussions that
they had about possible links with al Qaeda
terrorists," said Andrew Kohut, a pollster who leads
the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and
the Press.

The poll's findings are significant because they help
to explain why the public continues to support
operations in Iraq despite the setbacks and bloodshed
there. Americans have more tolerance for war when it
is provoked by an attack, particularly one by an
all-purpose villain such as Hussein. "That's why
attitudes about the decision to go to war are holding
up," Kohut said.

Bush's opponents say he encouraged this misconception
by linking al Qaeda to Hussein in almost every speech
on Iraq. Indeed, administration officials began to
hint about a Sept. 11-Hussein link soon after the
attacks. In late 2001, Vice President Cheney said it
was "pretty well confirmed" that attack mastermind
Mohamed Atta met with a senior Iraqi intelligence
official.

Speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press," Cheney was
referring to a meeting that Czech officials said took
place in Prague in April 2000. That allegation was the
most direct connection between Iraq and the Sept. 11
attacks. But this summer's congressional report on the
attacks states, "The CIA has been unable to establish
that [Atta] left the United States or entered Europe
in April under his true name or any known alias."

Bush, in his speeches, did not say directly that
Hussein was culpable in the Sept. 11 attacks. But he
frequently juxtaposed Iraq and al Qaeda in ways that
hinted at a link. In a March speech about Iraq's
"weapons of terror," Bush said: "If the world fails to
confront the threat posed by the Iraqi regime,
refusing to use force, even as a last resort, free
nations would assume immense and unacceptable risks.
The attacks of September the 11th, 2001, showed what
the enemies of America did with four airplanes. We
will not wait to see what terrorists or terrorist
states could do with weapons of mass destruction."

Then, in declaring the end of major combat in Iraq on
May 1, Bush linked Iraq and the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks: "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war
on terror that began on September the 11, 2001 -- and
still goes on. That terrible morning, 19 evil men --
the shock troops of a hateful ideology -- gave America
and the civilized world a glimpse of their ambitions."

Moments later, Bush added: "The liberation of Iraq is
a crucial advance in the campaign against terror.
We've removed an ally of al Qaeda, and cut off a
source of terrorist funding. And this much is certain:
No terrorist network will gain weapons of mass
destruction from the Iraqi regime, because the regime
is no more. In these 19 months that changed the world,
our actions have been focused and deliberate and
proportionate to the offense. We have not forgotten
the victims of September the 11th -- the last phone
calls, the cold murder of children, the searches in
the rubble. With those attacks, the terrorists and
their supporters declared war on the United States.
And war is what they got."

A number of nongovernment officials close to the Bush
administration have made the link more directly.
Richard N. Perle, who until recently was chairman of
the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, long argued that
there was Iraqi involvement, calling the evidence
"overwhelming."

Some Democrats said that although Bush did not make
the direct link to the 2001 attacks, his implications
helped to turn the public fury over Sept. 11 into
support for war against Iraq. "You couldn't
distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein," said
Democratic tactician Donna Brazile. "Every member of
the administration did the drumbeat. My mother said if
you repeat a lie long enough, it becomes a gospel
truth. This one became a gospel hit."

In a speech Aug. 7, former vice president Al Gore
cited Hussein's culpability in the attacks as one of
the "false impressions" given by a Bush administration
making a "systematic effort to manipulate facts in
service to a totalistic ideology."

Bush's defenders say the administration's rhetoric was
not responsible for the public perception of Hussein's
involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. While
Hussein and al Qaeda come from different strains of
Islam and Hussein's secularism is incompatible with al
Qaeda fundamentalism, Americans instinctively lump
both foes together as Middle Eastern enemies. "The
intellectual argument is there is a war in Iraq and a
war on terrorism and you have to separate them, but
the public doesn't do that," said Matthew Dowd, a Bush
campaign strategist. "They see Middle Eastern
terrorism, bad people in the Middle East, all as one
big problem."

A number of public-opinion experts agreed that the
public automatically blamed Iraq, just as they would
have blamed Libya if a similar attack had occurred in
the 1980s. There is good evidence for this: On Sept.
13, 2001, a Time/CNN poll found that 78 percent
suspected Hussein's involvement -- even though the
administration had not made a connection. The belief
remained consistent even as evidence to the contrary
emerged.

"You can say Bush should be faulted for not correcting
every single misapprehension, but that's something
different than saying they set out deliberately to
deceive," said Duke University political scientist
Peter D. Feaver. "Since the facts are all over the
place, Americans revert to a judgment: Hussein is a
bad guy who would do stuff to us if he could."

Key administration figures have largely abandoned any
claim that Iraq was involved in the 2001 attacks. "I'm
not sure even now that I would say Iraq had something
to do with it," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D.
Wolfowitz, a leading hawk on Iraq, said on the Laura
Ingraham radio show on Aug. 1.

A top White House official told The Washington Post on
July 31: "I don't believe that the evidence was there
to suggest that Iraq had played a direct role in
9/11." The official added: "Anything is possible, but
we hadn't ruled it in or ruled it out. There wasn't
evidence to substantiate that claim."

But the public continues to embrace the connection.

In follow-up interviews, poll respondents were
generally unsure why they believed Hussein was behind
the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, often describing it as an
instinct that came from news reports and their
long-standing views of Hussein. For example, Peter
Bankers, 59, a New York film publicist, figures his
belief that Hussein was behind the attacks "has
probably been fed to me in some PR way," but he
doesn't know how. "I think that the whole group of
people, those with anti-American feelings, they all
kind of cooperated with each other," he said.

Similarly, Kim Morrison, 32, a teacher from Plymouth,
Ind., described her belief in Hussein's guilt as a
"gut feeling" shaped by television. "From what we've
heard from the media, it seems like what they feel is
that Saddam and the whole al Qaeda thing are
connected," she said.

Deborah Tannen, a Georgetown University professor of
linguistics who has studied Bush's rhetoric, said it
is impossible to know but "plausible" that Bush's
words furthered such public impressions. "Clearly,
he's using language to imply a connection between
Saddam Hussein and September 11th," she said.

"There is a specific manipulation of language here to
imply a connection." Bush, she said, seems to imply
that in Iraq "we have gone to war with the terrorists
who attacked us."

Tannen said even a gentle implication would be enough
to reinforce Americans' feelings about Hussein. "If we
like the conclusion, we're much less critical of the
logic," she said.

The Post poll, conducted Aug. 7-11, found that 62
percent of Democrats, 80 percent of Republicans and 67
percent of independents suspected a link between
Hussein and 9/11. In addition, eight in 10 Americans
said it was likely that Hussein had provided
assistance to al Qaeda, and a similar proportion
suspected he had developed weapons of mass
destruction.

LOAD-DATE: September 06, 2003 


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