Saturday, September 06, 2003

reasons to despair about democracy, #470

From a random local news site:
A Washington Post poll finds nearly seven in 10 people believe it's likely Saddam was personally involved in the attacks carried out by al-Qaida... Veteran pollsters say the persistent belief of a link could help explain why public support for the decision to go to war in Iraq has been so resilient despite problems establishing a peaceful country.
Okay, so polls like this have been coming out for a long time, despite the abundance of reasons to think that the minority of people who do not believe in any link between Saddam Hussein (I refuse to refer to him simply by his first name) and 9/11 are right. To really get a sense of the extent to which Americans have a distorted view of the last two years of history, however, the poll I would like would ask Americans who they believe was more responsible for the 9/11 attacks: Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden? Am I being overly cynical to speculate that at least 20% of Americans would say Saddam Hussein?

Maybe my friends who work for a market research company can slip this in as a non sequitur question on one of their large-scale customer satisfaction surveys.

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