Gene Lyons April 23, 2003
Made for TV
Sometimes it's hard to tell how many Americans understand the difference between TV and the three-dimensional world. Just before the Iraq war, polls showed almost 60 percent held Saddam Hussein responsible for the 9/11 terror attacks--a claim not even the president made, although Bush took pains to link Saddam's alleged "weapons of mass destruction" and the terrorist threat.
Most who opposed the war thought the connection specious or dishonest. Nasty SOB that he was or is, we thought Saddam could be deterred. To take him down by force, we feared, would burden the U.S. with its own West Bank, embittered, humiliated, and seething with ethnic and religious hatreds which Saddam's tyranny kept in check. It would also be expensive, with American taxpayers paying first to blow Iraq to smithereens, then footing the bill for Halliburton, Bechtel and President Junior's other corporate chums to rebuild it.
Never mind the human toll; we are all geo-political strategists now. Crocodile tears aside, few GOP triumphalists exchanging high-fives over defeating a Third World nation with military resources amounting to roughly 1/2 of one percent of the U.S. defense budget appear terribly concerned about the dead and maimed on either side. The Pentagon has no plans to enumerate Iraqi casualties, military or civilian. The phrase "many thousands" is, as they say, close enough for government work.
Reporting on a 12-year old Iraqi boy, orphaned by a U.S. bomb and hospitalized with both arms blown off, a CNN correspondent actually asked if he understood the purposes of "Operation Iraqi Freedom." A Kuwaiti doctor tactfully responded that Ali Hamza had suffered "psychological trauma" and had no political views.
Another aspect of GOP triumphalism is hunting domestic heretics. Try to believe that the following sentences appeared in the lead to a New York Times thumb sucker entitled "Dilemma's Definition: The Left and Iraq" by one David Carr: "This has been a tough war for commentators on the American left. To hope for defeat meant cheering for Saddam Hussein. To hope for victory meant cheering for President Bush."
Evidently, Carr is not a sports fan, or he'd have understood the concept of, say, cheering for the Arkansas Razorbacks while also thinking they need a new coach. Nowhere did he show a particle of evidence that any of the pundits named--David Remnick and Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker, Eric Alterman of The Nation, Michael Kinsley of Slate, and Joan Walsh of Salon--hoped for defeat, predicted it, or had any sympathy whatever for Saddam. Kinsley, indeed, had written that "[n]o sane person doubted" that the U.S. would defeat Iraq. Carr's article was the journalistic equivalent of the sheep in Orwell's Animal Farm, eagerly chanting "Four legs good, two legs bad" to drown out criticism of Comrade Napoleon, the head pig.
So here we are scant days after the unexpectedly sudden fall of Baghdad--so mercifully abrupt that the Arab press is speculating that Republican Guard generals were bribed to take a powder. A tactical masterstroke, if so. Electrical power and sanitary water supplies have yet to be restored across most of Iraq. If looting has died down it's because there's nothing left to steal from plundered government ministries, presidential palaces, even hospitals.
The National Museum of Iraq, repository of one of the world's great archeological collections, lies in ruins--10,000 years of history vanished. The smoke still rises from the National Library, and the Ministry of Religious Endowment. Ancient master-works of calligraphy from "The Arabian Nights" to Korans that survived the Mongol conquest of 1258, have been burnt. Archeologists and historians begged the Pentagon months ago to protect these treasures. But as the retired generals now mocked for criticizing Rummy's battle plans argued, the U.S. lacked sufficient forces for the job. Never fear, however, the Oil Ministry was well-guarded.
Meanwhile, no weapons of mass destruction have been found. Somewhat belatedly, administration stalwarts are reportedly losing faith in intelligence reports. Kurds have taken to forcibly expelling Arabs from northern Iraq; U.S. troops have shot civilian protesters in Mosul; Sunnis and Shiites staged mass marches in Baghdad demanding an American pullout; Iraqi cops derisively known as "Ali Babas," (as in "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves") have been put back on the street out of necessity; and hundreds of thousands of Shiites have embarked upon a peaceful, but potentially destabilizing religious pilgrimage.
Amid the chaos and uncertainty, an April 17 ABC News/Washington Post poll revealed that 73 percent of Americans now fear that the U.S. will get "bogged down in a long and costly" mission in Iraq. Did they think it was a made-for-TV movie? Next came the most unsettling headline of all: "Officials Argue for Fast U.S. Exit From Iraq." The Washington Post quoted "senior administration officials" hinting at an American pullout in "a matter of months."
Are they out of their minds?
One point Gene missed is that the poll was slanted by its very wording "bogged down in a long and costly..."
Who would want to get “bogged down” in a “long and costly” (fill in the blank)?
Heck if they had worded poll questions like that prior to the war you would have found 90+% answering that they opposed the war. Instead people thought (falsely) that Iraq was responsible for 9/11. One could well argue that the pre-war polls were also “rigged” – by the perpetuation of a falsehood by Bush (Iraq caused 9/11) and tacitly condoned by the media.
The best polls are those that are carefully worded not to slant an issue and allow for the respondent to answer freely – open ended questions rather than multiple-choice. But those are expensive and time consuming to administer so most polls use multiple-choice which already restricts (while simultaneously suggesting) the answers available to the respondent. The wording of the question is also a prime means of manipulating otherwise scientific polls, as in the above case.
Scientific polling (polls conducted with truly random samples of the population) can be a very revealing practice but most “polls” you will encounter are either not scientific at all (the sample is not randomly generated) and only have propaganda “value” (for example the bogus ones Wolf Blitzer uses). Even those that are conducted scientifically can be easily subverted. Merely phrasing a question differently will change the result (as we saw above with regard to “long and costly”). This has been proven in studies in which subjects are presented with hypothetical situations in which only the wording of situation is varied.
Caveat emptor!
12:25:10 PM 
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