Fifty percent can be all wrong: A new Harris poll suggests that half of Americans believe Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction at the time Bushco decided to invade Iraq. And it appears that the delusion has been maintained and even enhanced by strong partisan rhetoric by bloggers and conservative media, as well as by individuals’ personal psychological need to find a justification for the ongoing war. The Associated Press reports:
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.
— Fox News
Pollsters say that the timing of the poll may help explain the results:
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.
The no-surprise aspect of the non-story didn’t stop the — surprise! — wingnuts from jumping all over it:
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 most analysts agree that the constant mantra of WMDs by Bushco has had an effect on perceptions — and has kept the story alive despite all evidence to the contrary.
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.
But as things go from worse to worser still in Iraq, it’s natural, say the analysts, for people to need a bogey man. And what better bogey man is there than the image of a homicidal Saddam Hussein armed with weapons that could kill thousands?
“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.”
And how about this instance of “fair and balanced” reportage from those bastions of the Fourth Estate over at Fox News:
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.
It’s been said before — the only WMDs around are not Saddam’s, but Bushco’s weapons of mass deception, which tragically will continue to do collateral damage to the truth for years to come.
