[Peace-discuss] reason, evidence, reality, and the American public

[Paul Patton]

* Half of U.S. Still Believes Iraq Had WMD *
  *by Charles J. Hanley *
     -- Do you believe in Iraqi "WMD"? Did Saddam Hussein's government have
weapons of mass destruction in 2003?

Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts
see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard
bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying
around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people, in their own minds,
to justify the war in Iraq.

People tend to become "independent of reality" in these circumstances, says
opinion analyst Steven Kull.

The reality in this case is that after a 16-month, $900-million-plus
investigation, the U.S. weapons hunters known as the Iraq Survey Group
declared that Iraq had dismantled its chemical, biological and nuclear arms
programs in 1991 under U.N. oversight. That finding in 2004 reaffirmed the
work of U.N. inspectors who in 2002-03 found no trace of banned arsenals in
Iraq.

Despite this, a Harris Poll released July 21 found that a full 50 percent of
U.S. respondents _ up from 36 percent last year _ said they believe Iraq did
have the forbidden arms when U.S. troops invaded in March 2003, an attack
whose stated purpose was elimination of supposed WMD. Other polls also have
found an enduring American faith in the WMD story.

"I'm flabbergasted," said Michael Massing, a media critic whose writings
dissected the largely unquestioning U.S. news reporting on the Bush
administration's shaky WMD claims in 2002-03.

"This finding just has to cause despair among those of us who hope for an
informed public able to draw reasonable conclusions based on evidence,"
Massing said.

Timing may explain some of the poll result. Two weeks before the survey, two
Republican lawmakers, Pennsylvania's Sen. Rick Santorum and Michigan's Rep.
Peter Hoekstra, released an intelligence report in Washington saying 500
chemical munitions had been collected in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.

"I think the Harris Poll was measuring people's surprise at hearing this
after being told for so long there were no WMD in the country," said
Hoekstra spokesman Jamal Ware.

But the Pentagon and outside experts stressed that these abandoned shells,
many found in ones and twos, were 15 years old or more, their chemical
contents were degraded, and they were unusable as artillery ordnance. Since
the 1990s, such "orphan" munitions, from among 160,000 made by Iraq and
destroyed, have turned up on old battlefields and elsewhere in Iraq,
ex-inspectors say. In other words, this was no surprise.

"These are not stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction," said Scott
Ritter, the ex-Marine who was a U.N. inspector in the 1990s. "They weren't
deliberately withheld from inspectors by the Iraqis."

Conservative commentator Deroy Murdock, who trumpeted Hoekstra's
announcement in his syndicated column, complained in an interview that the
press "didn't give the story the play it deserved." But in some quarters it
was headlined.

"Our top story tonight, the nation abuzz today ..." was how Fox News led its
report on the old, stray shells. Talk-radio hosts and their callers seized
on it. Feedback to blogs grew intense. "Americans are waking up from a
distorted reality," read one posting.

Other claims about supposed WMD had preceded this, especially speculation
since 2003 that Iraq had secretly shipped WMD abroad. A former Iraqi
general's book _ at best uncorroborated hearsay _ claimed "56 flights" by
jetliners had borne such material to Syria.

But Kull, Massing and others see an influence on opinion that's more
sustained than the odd headline.

"I think the Santorum-Hoekstra thing is the latest 'factoid,' but the basic
dynamic is the insistent repetition by the Bush administration of the
original argument," said John Prados, author of the 2004 book "Hoodwinked:
The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War."

Administration statements still describe Saddam's Iraq as a threat. Despite
the official findings, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has allowed only
that "perhaps" WMD weren't in Iraq. And Bush himself, since 2003, has
repeatedly insisted on one plainly false point: that Saddam rebuffed the U.N.
inspectors in 2002, that "he wouldn't let them in," as he said in 2003, and
"he chose to deny inspectors," as he said this March.

The facts are that Iraq _ after a four-year hiatus in cooperating with
inspections _ acceded to the U.N. Security Council's demand and allowed
scores of experts to conduct more than 700 inspections of potential weapons
sites from Nov. 27, 2002, to March 16, 2003. The inspectors said they could
wrap up their work within months. Instead, the U.S. invasion aborted that
work.

As recently as May 27, Bush told West Point graduates, "When the United
Nations Security Council gave him one final chance to disclose and disarm,
or face serious consequences, he refused to take that final opportunity."

"Which isn't true," observed Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a scholar of
presidential rhetoric at the University of Pennsylvania. But "it doesn't
surprise me when presidents reconstruct reality to make their policies
defensible." This president may even have convinced himself it's true, she
said.

Americans have heard it. A poll by Kull's WorldPublicOpinion.org found that
seven in 10 Americans perceive the administration as still saying Iraq had a
WMD program. Combine that rhetoric with simplistic headlines about WMD
"finds," and people "assume the issue is still in play," Kull said.

"For some it almost becomes independent of reality and becomes very
partisan." The WMD believers are heavily Republican, polls show.

Beyond partisanship, however, people may also feel a need to believe in WMD,
the analysts say.

"As perception grows of worsening conditions in Iraq, it may be that
Americans are just hoping for more of a solid basis for being in Iraq to
begin with," said the Harris Poll's David Krane.

Charles Duelfer, the lead U.S. inspector who announced the negative WMD
findings two years ago, has watched uncertainly as TV sound bites, bloggers
and politicians try to chip away at "the best factual account," his group's
densely detailed, 1,000-page final report.

"It is easy to see what is accepted as truth rapidly morph from one
representation to another," he said in an e-mail. "It would be a shame if
one effect of the power of the Internet was to undermine any commonly agreed
set of facts."

The creative "morphing" goes on.

As Israeli troops and Hezbollah guerrillas battled in Lebanon on July 21, a
Fox News segment suggested, with no evidence, yet another destination for
the supposed doomsday arms.

"ARE SADDAM HUSSEIN'S WMDS NOW IN HEZBOLLAH'S HANDS?" asked the headline,
lingering for long minutes on TV screens in a million American homes.

(c) 2006 The Associated Press
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