Tag: poll

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‘Most Americans Believe Iran Is Building a Nuclear Weapon’

WSJ.com: Most Americans Believe Iran Is Building a Nuclear Weapon.

My headline for the story might be, “So what do you expect?” The Wall Street Journal reports the results of a Harris Interactive poll finding that “a large majority of Americans believe Iran is using its uranium research program to build a nuclear weapon.” Is that belief a surprise, considering the fact this is precisely the message that government and media are giving citizens, readers, viewers and listeners every time the subject of Iran comes up?

Let’s take a look at what Harris Interactive said Americans believed about Iraq in March 2003: Among other findings reported on March 6 of that year — 13 days before the war began — Harris reported 80 percent of Americans “believe Iraq has or is making nuclear, chemical or biological weapons”; 78 percent believed “believe there is at least some link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.” Lost in the mists of time is the finding that, even with those beliefs about Saddam and Iraq, only a plurality of Americans (45-36 percent) said they favored an attack at the time.

The point of all the above being: If people are bombarded day and night by the same set of “facts,” that’s bound to affect their thinking.

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Polling the Troops

Zogby International will get a ton of publicity for its new poll on how members of the U.S. armed forces in Iraq feel about serving there. The headlines so far focus on the poll’s finding that 72 percent of those surveyed — 944 people serving with various branches, a survey size Zogby says gives a 3.5 percent margin of error for the full sample — think the U.S. should withdraw sometime in the next 12 months. Twenty-three percent go along with the commander-in-chief’s suggestion that the forces should stay in Iraq “as long as they are needed.” The Marines are most gung-ho on staying — only three in five think we should be out within a year; four out of five National Guard members and reservists think it’s time to be winding things up.

More interesting numbers, to me: Three in five say they know why they’re in Iraq; two in five say they’re unclear on the reason. Nine out of ten reject the presence of weapons of mass destruction as a reason for invading. So why did we go in? Five out of six say it’s payback for Saddam Hussein’s role in the 9/11 attacks. Three out of four also think we wanted to make sure Saddam didn’t protect al Qaida in Iraq.

It’s another black eye for the reality-based community, which has insisted for years that a) Saddam had no role in 9/11 (even Cheney, the promoter-in-chief of that myth, was eventually forced to concede the point) and b) Saddam had no substantive relationship with al Qaida. At the same time, though, the troops don’t seem to be buying one of the substitute rationales for the war: that it’s all about creating a model democracy for the Arab world. Only one in four respondents named that as a reason for the war.

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Those Crazy Americans

You’ve got to love those crazy Americans. Wait, that’s me, too. Change that to “us crazy Americans.” Just seven weeks ago, we had a chance to fire the guy who decided that the single most important thing to do in the whole wide world, just couldn’t wait to get it done, was to bust world-class bad guy and former U.S. ally (those crazy Americans!) Saddam Hussein.

But no. For reasons still inadequately explained (and no, I’m not buying fraud as the answer, or the “morality” thing, either) and perhaps irretrievably buried in the minds of tens of millions of voters, the guy was re-elected.

Now, the Washington Post and ABC News are out with a new poll: A majority of us crazy Americans now think the war’s, like, a mistake:

“Most Americans now believe the war with Iraq was not worth fighting and more than half want to fire embattled Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the chief architect of that conflict, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

“The survey found that 56 percent of the country now believes that the cost of the conflict in Iraq outweighs the benefits, while 42 percent disagreed. It marked the first time since the war began that a clear majority of Americans have judged the war to have been a mistake.

“Barely a third of the country approves of the job that Rumsfeld is doing as defense secretary, and 52 percent said President Bush should sack Rumsfeld, a view shared by a big majority of Democrats and political independents.”

But then comes the number that probably partly explains the way we crazy Americans voted last month: “… Nearly six in 10 — 58 percent — said the United States should keep its military forces in Iraq rather than withdraw them, a proportion that has not changed in seven months.”

OK — that’s honorable. Let’s not cut and run and leave those nice Iraqis in the lurch. The thing you have to question about that sort of thinking, though, is the assumption that our indefinite presence is a stabilizing, positive influence. I mean, we sure can’t imagine anyplace in the world that doesn’t benefit from our warm attention, but at some point you have to consider the possibility that Iraq could be better off with some different kind of foreign oversight, or regime, than what we’re trying to impose.