I guess it’s poll day here at The Carpetbagger Report. I’ve already mentioned two; here’s another.
The Washington Post ran discomforting poll results on the front page on Saturday, showing that nearly 70 percent of Americans continue to believe — without evidence — that Saddam Hussein participated in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
A similar poll, conducted by the LA Times in April, found that 60% of Americans “say they believe Hussein bears at least some responsibility for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.” With this in mind, it would appear that Americans’ understanding of what led us to invade Iraq has become less informed in recent months, not more informed.
This isn’t even a partisan problem, it’s an electorate problem. Republicans, Democrats, and Independents answered the question on the al Queda-Hussein link in largely the same way.
In some ways, I guess this explains why the public has lingering skepticism about the Democratic Party and national security issues. As far as people are concerned, Dems largely opposed war in Iraq despite Saddam Hussein’s involvement in 9/11. If I was misinformed enough to believe Iraq’s former regime helped execute the terrorist attacks on the U.S., I wouldn’t trust the opposition party either.
Of course, people are terribly misinformed and this has serious consequences. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, we can be either uninformed or free, but not both.
But before I lay all the blame at the hands of the masses, the Bush administration certainly contributed to, and benefited from, this widespread confusion. To be sure, the White House has been cagey for over a year on the relationship, or as Colin Powell put it, the “nexus,” between al Queda and Hussein. Nevertheless, the administration has never produced a shred of evidence to bolster any claim that shows a connection.
In advance of the recent invasion of Iraq, White House officials, including the president, would talk about Iraq in the context of “terrorists” without making any effort to disconnect Hussein from 9/11. This was, of course, intentional. The more people believed Hussein was a threat to the U.S., the less opposition there would be to a war.
As Andrew Kohut, a pollster who leads the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, explained, this led to rhetorical “hints” from the White House to reinforce possible links between Hussein and al Queda in the public’s mind.
The Post pointed to several recent examples in which Bush juxtaposed Hussein and al Queda to seamlessly show a connection where one probably never existed.
In March, for example, 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.”
On May 1, in declaring the end of “major” combat operations in Iraq, Bush did it again, saying, “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…. 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.”
Meanwhile, even the Bush administration itself seems a little confused. On the one hand, some White House officials deny that there was any link between Iraq, al Queda, and 9/11. Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the neocons’ uber-hawk, said in August, “I’m not sure even now that I would say Iraq had something to do with” 9/11.
A month earlier, a “top White House official” told the Post there “wasn’t evidence to substantiate that claim” that there were Hussein-al Queda links.
Yet as recently as yesterday, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was on Fox News Channel playing up the link. Tony Snow asked Rice if she believed “there was a link between al Queda and the regime of Saddam Hussein before the war.” Rice said, “Absolutely.”
It appears this administration has been so callous with the truth when it comes to foreign policy, it can’t even keep its lies straight.