Posted on 10/23/2004 7:13:31 PM PDT by focusandclarity
WASHINGTON - Three out of four self-described supporters of President George W Bush still believe pre-war Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or active programs to produce them, and that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein gave "substantial support" to al-Qaeda terrorists, according to a survey released Thursday.
Moreover, as many or more Bush supporters hold those beliefs today than they did several months ago, before the publication of a series of well-publicized official government reports that debunked both notions.
Those are among the most striking findings of the survey, which was conducted in mid-October by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) and Knowledge Networks, a California-based polling firm.
The survey, which polled the views of nearly 900 randomly chosen respondents equally divided between Bush supporters and those intending to vote for Democratic Senator John Kerry in November's presidential election, found a yawning gap in the world views, particularly as regards pre-war Iraq, between the two groups.
"It is normal during elections for supporters of presidential candidates to have fundamental disagreements about values or strategies," said an analysis produced by PIPA. But "the current election is unique in that Bush supporters and Kerry supporters have profoundly different perceptions of reality. In the face of a stream of high-level assessments about pre-war Iraq, Bush supporters cling to the refuted beliefs that Iraq had WMD or supported al-Qaeda."
Indeed, the only issue on which the survey found broad agreement between the two sets of voters was on the question of whether the administration itself actively propagated the misconceptions about Iraq's WMD and connections to al-Qaeda.
"One of the reasons that Bush supporters have these [erroneous] beliefs is that they perceive the Bush administration confirming them," noted PIPA director Steven Kull. "Interestingly, this is one point on which Bush and Kerry supporters agree."
The survey also found a major gap between Bush's stated positions on a number of international issues and what his supporters believe that position to be. A strong majority of Bush backers believe, for example, that the president supports a range of global treaties and institutions, which he is actually on record as opposing.
On pre-war Iraq, the survey asked each respondent questions about WMD and links to al-Qaeda on three levels: 1) What the respondents themselves believed about the two issues; 2) What they believed "most experts" had concluded about them; and 3) What they believed the Bush administration was saying about them.
The survey found 72% of Bush supporters believe either that Iraq had actual WMD (47%) or a major program for making them (25%), despite the widespread media coverage in early October of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA's) Duelfer Report, the final word on the subject by the US$1 billion, 15-month investigation by the Iraq Survey Group.
It concluded Saddam had dismantled all of his WMD programs shortly after the 1991 Gulf War and had never tried to reconstitute them. Nonetheless, 56% of Bush supporters said they thought most experts currently believe Iraq had actual WMD, and 57% said they thought the Duelfer Report had concluded that Iraq either had WMD (19%) or a major WMD program (38%).
Only 26% of Kerry supporters, by contrast, said they believed that pre-war Iraq had either actual WMD or a WMD program, and only 18% said they believed "most experts" agreed with those two possibilities.
Similar results were found with respect to Saddam's alleged support for al-Qaeda, a theory that has been most persistently asserted by Vice President Dick Cheney, but that was thoroughly debunked by the final report of the bipartisan 9-11 Commission earlier this summer.
Seventy-five percent of Bush supporters said they believed Iraq was providing "substantial" support to al-Qaeda, with 20% asserting Baghdad was directly involved in the September 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Sixty-three percent of Bush supporters even believed that clear evidence of such support has been found, and 60% believed "most experts" have reached the same conclusion.
By contrast, only 30% of Kerry supporters said they believe such a link existed and that most experts agree.
But large majorities of both Bush and Kerry supporters agree that the administration is saying Iraq had WMD and was providing substantial support to al-Qaeda. In regard to WMD, those majorities have actually grown since last summer, according to PIPA.
Remarkably, asked whether the US should have gone to war with Iraq if US intelligence had concluded Baghdad did not have a WMD program and was not supporting al-Qaeda, 58% of Bush supporters said no, and 61% said they assumed the president would also not have gone to war under those circumstances.
"To support the president and to accept that he took the US to war based on mistaken assumptions," said Kull, "likely creates substantial cognitive dissonance and leads Bush supporters to suppress awareness of unsettling information about pre-war Iraq."
Kull added that this "cognitive dissonance" could also help explain other remarkable findings in the survey, particularly with respect to Bush supporters' misperceptions about the president's own positions.
In particular, majorities of Bush supporters incorrectly assumed he supports multilateral approaches to various international issues, including the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) (69%), the land mine treaty (72%), and the Kyoto Protocol to curb greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming (51%).
In all of these cases, majorities of Bush supporters said they favored the positions that they imputed, incorrectly, to the president. Large majorities of Kerry supporters, on the other hand, showed they knew both their candidate's and Bush's positions on the same issues.
Bush supporters were also found to hold misperceptions regarding international support for the president and his policies. Despite a steady flow over the past year of official statements by foreign governments and public-opinion polls showing strong opposition to the Iraq war, less than one-third of Bush supporters believed that most people in foreign countries opposed Washington having gone to war.
Two-thirds said they believed foreign views were either evenly divided on the war (42%) or that the majority of foreigners actually favored the war (26%). Three of every four Kerry supporters, on the other hand, said they understood that most of the rest of the world opposed the war.
Kull, who has been analyzing US public opinion on foreign-policy issues for two decades, said misperceptions of Bush supporters showed, if anything, the hold the president has over his loyalists. "The roots of the Bush supporters' resistance to information very likely lie in the traumatic experience of 9/11 and equally into the near pitch-perfect leadership that President Bush showed in its immediate wake," he said.
"This appears to have created a powerful bond between Bush and his supporters - and an idealized image of the president that makes it difficult for his supporters to imagine that he could have made incorrect judgements before the war, that world public opinion would be critical of his policies or that the president could hold foreign-policy positions that are at odds with his supporters."
Buh Bye
OK, where do you start? Where's the BARF alert for one...
Another brilliant "rescue" attempt to free Americans from the clutches of the most manipulative, deceptive President in U.S. History. /sarcasm
LW crap
I thought this article would try to tell me what happened to all of the documented but unaccounted for WMDs. Guess not.
mmmmooooooooooooo
Charles Dueffler is also the same person that has testified in front of Congress stating Iraq was “preserving and expanding its knowledge to design and develop nuclear weapons.” You also have a top Iraqi scientist who has now disclosed Saddam Hussein fully intended on re-starting his nuclear proliferation when the UN sanctions lifted.
http://www.inthebullpen.com/archives/2004/09/27/target-syria/
The really important news in that report is that UN sanctions were disintegrating—and as soon as they did, Saddam Hussein was planning to restart his weapons programs.
How quickly could he have done this? We have an answer to this question too, because last month Saddam’s former nuclear chief, Mahdi Obeidi, wrote a piece for the New York Times saying that the Iraqi nuclear weapons programs could have been reconstituted within months.
Threat is always a matter of perception, but our nuclear program could have been reinstituted at the snap of Saddam Hussein’s fingers. The sanctions and the lucrative oil-for-food program had served as powerful deterrents, but world events - like Iran’s current efforts to step up its nuclear ambitions - might well have changed the situation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/26/opinion/26obeidi.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Iraqi scientists had the knowledge and the designs needed to jumpstart the program if necessary. And there is no question that we could have done so very quickly. In the late 1980’s, we put together the most efficient covert nuclear program the world has ever seen. In about three years, we gained the ability to enrich uranium and nearly become a nuclear threat; we built an effective centrifuge from scratch, even though we started with no knowledge of centrifuge technology. Had Saddam Hussein ordered it and the world looked the other way, we might have shaved months if not years off our previous efforts.
Osama bin Laden is NOT Al Qaeda. Just getting the head is not enough. This is a war against Terrorism, which you obviously don't realize. Saddam was tight with Al Qaeda and subsidized many terrorist organizations. Terrorism is never just a "nuisance". Was it a nuisance on Clinton's watch when they tried to blow the Trade Center up in 1993? What did Clinton do? THat is exactly the way Kerry would have behaved.
Anyways. If we listened to idiots like you and your friend Kerry, SADDAM would still be in power and sanctions would most likely be over due to all of the bribes from the oil for food scandal. Saddam then would be aggressively pursuing his nuclear weapons program and would probably already have made some by now. The guy was weaponizing ricin into a mist. Wake up.
Additionally, your candidate is so clueless as our focus has never been taken off hunting for Osama... we have been trying to find him since the beginning.
What!! outsource job of rebuilding to the France and German crooks? You are nuts.
Whenever the WMD are found (and they will be tomorrow, the next day, next year or next decade), will all these braying finger-pointing liberals be forced into accountability for their self-righteous pronouncements??? No??? I didn't think so. (By the way, is not Israel our ally? Did not saddam give substantial support to the terrorists afflicting Israel? Why did some al-qaeda fleeing Afghanistan run to saddam's Iraq? Inquiring minds want to know.)
I agree with you 100%. Please take a deep breath and reread my post and who it's addressed to. It's sarcasm.
I detected the sarcasm. Yer OK.
BigBobber is being sarcastic!
He was being sarcastic!
I was called a "troll" between two repliers the other night, and I, (being new to freerepublic didn't know what they meant) now I guess I know it is not a compliment.
I have and still believe WMD existed in Iraq...I think they were smuggled into Syria and Lebanon's Bekka Valley just before the war and there was an article just the other day how they were finding massive piles of arms in Northern Iraq.
The reason why I posted the article is because I believe it is true, most Bush supporters (myself included) adamantly believe (we're not fools) that there were WMDs, and nothing will ever make us think differently.
I am glad you posted it. A liberal friend sent me this same article yesterday (I think from Yahoo news), and asked me if I was one of those who still had my head buried in the sand. Truthfully, it is THEY who have their heads in the sand!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1224050/posts
Do yourself a favor. Look at this post and read. Seriously, look at these articles.
thanks for your reply. You clarified the points recently made by Dueffler and his final report but were buried or distorted by the major media outlets. I agree with you on all of these and the point Dueffler made about many of the WMDs being shipped out just before the war.
Thanks again, we need folks like you in this country who do focus and succintly make clear points.
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