Could this possibly be true?

Human Tide

Check out the article below and give your honest opinion. Is there any possible way that half of the country could believe this? Is this simply one of those polls that uses confusing language to try to elicit a certain response? I could see maybe 20 or 25% of the public being so misinformed, but a full half? I can recall seeing on Fox News during the war a big headline about a massive chemical weapons facility discovered in Iraq. After checking all the other news sources and seeing no such headline, I later found out that it was a pharmaceutical factory or something like that. I assume Fox never revisited the story, and maybe therein lies the problem. Do viewers just take the headlines at face value and ignore the details? If I had to guess, I'd say they just don't care. The war still doesn't affect their day-to-day lives to a great extent, and it's still just viewed as a bunch of numbers. The ingredients are probably simple apathy, an underlying prejudice against Arabs, a willingness to believe what a leader says without much questioning, and probably not much more. By the way, perhaps most disturbing is the last line of the article - Fox news at its finest.


Half of U.S. still believes Iraq had WMD

By CHARLES J. HANLEY
AP SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT


U.S. military Stryker vehicles convoy down a main highway in a Sunni populated area, Saturday, Aug. 5, 2006, in Baghdad, Iraq. Several Stryker vehicles were seen Saturday in Baghdad's mostly Sunni neighborhood of Ghazaliyah, where Iraqi police used loudspeakers to encourage residents to go about their business and reopen shops because the additional troops were there to protect them. As part of a campaign to curb sectarian violence in Baghdad, the U.S. Army transferred 3,700 soldiers of the 172nd Stryker Brigade from northern Iraq to the capital to reinforce U.S. and Iraqi security forces. (AP Photo/Asaad Mouhsin)
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.

lukin321

ha, i JUST posted this right before you did. i can't believe it either.

Commy

Human Tide wrote:

Check out the article below and give your honest opinion. Is there any possible way that half of the country could believe this? Is this simply one of those polls that uses confusing language to try to elicit a certain response? I could see maybe 20 or 25% of the public being so misinformed, but a full half? I can recall seeing on Fox News during the war a big headline about a massive chemical weapons facility discovered in Iraq. After checking all the other news sources and seeing no such headline, I later found out that it was a pharmaceutical factory or something like that. I assume Fox never revisited the story, and maybe therein lies the problem. Do viewers just take the headlines at face value and ignore the details? If I had to guess, I'd say they just don't care. The war still doesn't affect their day-to-day lives to a great extent, and it's still just viewed as a bunch of numbers. The ingredients are probably simple apathy, an underlying prejudice against Arabs, a willingness to believe what a leader says without much questioning, and probably not much more. By the way, perhaps most disturbing is the last line of the article - Fox news at its finest.


Half of U.S. still believes Iraq had WMD

By CHARLES J. HANLEY
AP SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT


U.S. military Stryker vehicles convoy down a main highway in a Sunni populated area, Saturday, Aug. 5, 2006, in Baghdad, Iraq. Several Stryker vehicles were seen Saturday in Baghdad's mostly Sunni neighborhood of Ghazaliyah, where Iraqi police used loudspeakers to encourage residents to go about their business and reopen shops because the additional troops were there to protect them. As part of a campaign to curb sectarian violence in Baghdad, the U.S. Army transferred 3,700 soldiers of the 172nd Stryker Brigade from northern Iraq to the capital to reinforce U.S. and Iraqi security forces. (AP Photo/Asaad Mouhsin)
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.

"...and the media distorts the truth..."

rebornFixer

Um, Iraq DID have WMD, at least at one time. It is not clear where the weapons went ... If they were used up on Iran, destroyed back in the early 90s during the first Gulf war, destroyed or smuggled out of Iraq right before the last invasion.
Perhaps people are confusing history with the current state of affairs?

Human Tide

reborncareerist wrote:

Um, Iraq DID have WMD, at least at one time. It is not clear where the weapons went ... If they were used up on Iran, destroyed back in the early 90s during the first Gulf war, destroyed or smuggled out of Iraq right before the last invasion.
Perhaps people are confusing history with the current state of affairs?

"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."

dayan

reborncareerist wrote:

Um, Iraq DID have WMD, at least at one time. It is not clear where the weapons went ... If they were used up on Iran, destroyed back in the early 90s during the first Gulf war, destroyed or smuggled out of Iraq right before the last invasion.
Perhaps people are confusing history with the current state of affairs?

I would add to this that it is fairly clear that Iraq was looking into restarting its nuclear weapons program, or at the very least there was good reason to think they were interested in this. Christopher Hitchens has written some incredible pieces on this in Slate. They can all be found at http://www.hitchensweb.com.

monkey spanker

Iraq did have wmd's. saddam used them on his enemies, and his own people. he failed to properly get rid of those wmd's after the gulf war..now they are gone, where they are nobody knows....but it should worry you.

rebornFixer

Human Tide wrote:

"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."

OK, cool ... Then why were UN inspectors balking at the Iraqi government's refusal to allow inspectors full access to all sites of interest? This was going on right up until the invasion started.

dayan

Human Tide wrote:

"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."

But this seems beside the point. The fact that post-facto we didn't find weapons doesn't mean that there wasn't reason to think that we would find weapons beforehand. As regards the justification for going to war it is less important what we actually found, and more important whether we had a good reason to think we would find something to begin with.

rebornFixer

Just for the record, I don't think that the WMD excuse was actually a valid reason to invade Iraq. I was just arguing that some confusion on the part of people is understandable in this case. Not justified, but understandable.

Human Tide

reborncareerist wrote:

OK, cool ... Then why were UN inspectors balking at the Iraqi government's refusal to allow inspectors full access to all sites of interest? This was going on right up until the invasion started.

Perhaps you should take up your concerns with the Iraq Survey Group and the inspectors that gathered the evidence for their report. You might also note that prior to the war the inspectors wanted to continue their work before Bush and company decided to end their mission early and start the war.

The bottom line is that the US government, after a long and expensive investigation, says Iraq didn't have WMD. If you have a better source than that to suggest they did, then produce it.

rebornFixer

Human Tide wrote:

Perhaps you should take up your concerns with the Iraq Survey Group and the inspectors that gathered the evidence for their report. You might also note that prior to the war the inspectors wanted to continue their work before Bush and company decided to end their mission early and start the war.

The bottom line is that the US government, after a long and expensive investigation, says Iraq didn't have WMD. If you have a better source than that to suggest they did, then produce it.

You're not getting my point ... I've already said that it is quite possible that Iraq did NOT have WMD after the 90s. You guys are all agape at the fact that people in the U.S. remain confused about the issue, but this doesn't surprise me that much.

Human Tide

dayan wrote:

But this seems beside the point. The fact that post-facto we didn't find weapons doesn't mean that there wasn't reason to think that we would find weapons beforehand. As regards the justification for going to war it is less important what we actually found, and more important whether we had a good reason to think we would find something to begin with.

Beside the point? Are you joking? The topic of the article was that people still believe Iraq had WMDs, when the US governement's report had explicitly said that it didn't. The quote I produced was simply stating what the Iraq Survey Group determined. It was absolutely the point. I wasn't discussing justifications for the war.

Human Tide

reborncareerist wrote:

You're not getting my point ... I've already said that it is quite possible that Iraq did NOT have WMD after the 90s. You guys are all agape at the fact that people in the U.S. remain confused about the issue, but this doesn't surprise me that much.

I get your point, but I don't buy it for a second. The government has put forward an unequivocal report, which when coupled with the fact that nothing has been found, should be enough for any reasonably interested person to realize that there almost certainly were no WMD there.

Seriously, you think it's reasonable that people would be completely unaware of the whole inspection process and the final report?

rebornFixer

Human Tide wrote:

I get your point, but I don't buy it for a second. The government has put forward an unequivocal report, which when coupled with the fact that nothing has been found, should be enough for any reasonably interested person to realize that there almost certainly were no WMD there.

Seriously, you think it's reasonable that people would be completely unaware of the whole inspection process and the final report?

Yes, because of all the mixed messages in the media, not to mention coming out of Bush himself. I remember following the whole affair pretty closely, and there were all kinds of statements from UN officials about needing more time to do their jobs and therefore, presumably, said jobs weren't finished (contrary to the report you cite). Obviously there are big contradictions here, so is it any wonder that people don't have a clue?

Human Tide

reborncareerist wrote:

Yes, because of all the mixed messages in the media, not to mention coming out of Bush himself. I remember following the whole affair pretty closely, and there were all kinds of statements from UN officials about needing more time to do their jobs and therefore, presumably, said jobs weren't finished (contrary to the report you cite). Obviously there are big contradictions here, so is it any wonder that people don't have a clue?

Well, I guess it's understandable if one accepts that people are dim and don't pay attention. That seemed to be what the article and poll suggested, but I wanted to raise the possiblity that perhaps people are better informed...

rebornFixer

Human Tide wrote:

Well, I guess it's understandable if one accepts that people are dim and don't pay attention. That seemed to be what the article and poll suggested, but I wanted to raise the possiblity that perhaps people are better informed...

Maybe in some kind of factual sense, people are dim and don't pay attention. A more kind and perhaps realistic appraisal is that the average person has a lot on his or her plate, and that knowledge of current affairs frequently falls by the wayside.

dayan

Human Tide wrote:

Beside the point? Are you joking? The topic of the article was that people still believe Iraq had WMDs, when the US governement's report had explicitly said that it didn't. The quote I produced was simply stating what the Iraq Survey Group determined. It was absolutely the point. I wasn't discussing justifications for the war.

In that case I retract my statement. I've simply become conditioned to assume that whenever someone brings up the WMD and Iraq they are attacking the justification for the war in the first place. Apologies.

Human Tide

reborncareerist wrote:

Maybe in some kind of factual sense, people are dim and don't pay attention. A more kind and perhaps realistic appraisal is that the average person has a lot on his or her plate, and that knowledge of current affairs frequently falls by the wayside.

Well, I think the fundamental disagreement here is that I don't find it at all acceptable that one would be "confused' on the issue. When it comes to matters of such importance, when hundredes of thousands of lives are at stake, not to mention economic and diplomatic prosperity, one has an obligation to care and pay attention. I can assure you that we all have a lot on our plates, and it doesn't take much time or effort simply to care about the state of the country and its place in the world. As I initially said, I think it's apathy more than anything. People being dim would be another explanation, but I doubt that it's the basic problem.

Human Tide

dayan wrote:

In that case I retract my statement. I've simply become conditioned to assume that whenever someone brings up the WMD and Iraq they are attacking the justification for the war in the first place. Apologies.

No problem.

Eliot Rosewater

reborncareerist wrote:

You're not getting my point ... I've already said that it is quite possible that Iraq did NOT have WMD after the 90s. You guys are all agape at the fact that people in the U.S. remain confused about the issue, but this doesn't surprise me that much.

The average U.S. citizen is a fucking idiot. Take a look at who we re-elected, for fuck's sake. Doesn't surprise me that many of us still refuse to believe the truth. Plus, we're brainwashed from birth to believe this is an hornorable and moral country, so we probably have a hard time accepting the fact that we're lied to on a daily basis by our phony government.

Ed's version of Beast of Burden, "I just wanna live life and be dumb and happy like an American."