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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Many Americans, though, haven't come to their conclusions through a fair-minded weighing of the facts, because they don't have the facts. The reason is partly that, in the case of Iraq, the president has disseminated false information, and Americans, as much as they like to think of themselves as skeptics and rebels, tend to believe their presidents. "Do I believe that this war was waged for the flimsiest of reasons? I certainly do," says Zogby. "However, people will be trusting. It takes quite a commitment to get people not to trust what their president says."
"This has been happening for along time," says Rosen. "I remember being on the phone with journalists who were obsessed with the way Reagan would say one thing and do another. There were stories about what he didn't know about the world." The left, he says, would survey America and wonder, "How could they vote for this guy Reagan? Don't they see what a clown he is? Are Americans so hoodwinked by this guy?"
Muravchik, for one, rejects the notion of Bush's mendacity out of hand. "There's no chance that the president lied to the people," he says. "It would be such a catastrophic thing to do. It would be 10 times stupider than having Monica at the White House. It's inconceivable. This is really fantasy land. The world doesn't work that way."
Views like Muravchik's grow more common during wartime, says Dana Ward, a Pitzer College professor who serves as the executive director of the International Society of Political Psychology. "There's a tendency to rally behind a leader whenever there's any kind of bullets flying," he says. "We saw it in the first Gulf War and we certainly saw it in the second Gulf War. That is a normal part of the process. What's not normal, though it's precedented, is for the administration to put out information designed to manipulate public opinion."
Thus it's not surprising that Americans believed Bush when he said that Saddam was seeking nuclear components, backing al-Qaida and threatening America with obliteration. Nor is it surprising that many people accepted it when he said, bluntly and wrongly, that America has found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
In his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, Bush told Americans, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," though American intelligence agencies knew the only evidence underlying this assertion was a crude forgery. At his press conference on March 6, Bush said that Saddam Hussein "has trained and financed al-Qaida-type organizations before, al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations," though no link between Saddam and al-Qaida has emerged. On "Meet the Press" on March 16, Vice President Dick Cheney said, "[W]e believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. On Polish TV on May 30, Bush said, "But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them."
If the ignorance of many Americans is simply a result of believing their president (and many Democrats, who echoed the White House's assessment), such credulity is exacerbated by the mainstream press, which until recently hardly challenged the White House's assertions. Greenberger blames "captive media" that's wholly devoted to spouting the White House line. "That is something new and may be a reason it takes longer to sort of pierce the public's understanding of this. You have at least a half-dozen nationally known talk-show hosts who were supportive of [the Iraq war] and continue to articulate views that would make the average citizen believe there's not a problem here."
To simply say that the public has been duped by the White House and Fox News is far too reductive, though. While some Americans are deluded about Iraq's WMD, others simply don't care. After all, if a third of Americans surveyed believe weapons of mass destruction have been found, two-thirds realize they haven't been. Meanwhile, there's been an important shift in public opinion suggesting that Americans aren't much more attached to the president's initial justification for war with Iraq than Bush himself is. Before the war, a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll showed that only 38 percent of Americans felt the war would be justified even if weapons of mass destruction were not found. When the same pollsters asked that question two weeks ago, 56 percent of Americans felt the war was justified even if the weapons are never uncovered.
This jibes with the idea, favored by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, that weapons of mass destruction don't matter after all, both because Saddam was such a psychopathic sadist and because, post 9/11, America needed to strike somewhere in the Middle East as a show of strength.
Friedman expounds that idea as if it were a sophisticated bit of realpolitik, but a dumbed-down version of it may be at work in American life. "In a way, it's Americans' insularity, their isolationism, that may be showing its ugly head," says Susan Tifft, a Duke University professor and former Time magazine writer who's written several books about American journalism. "Saddam, Osama, they all sound the same, they're all rag-heads, so who cares? I don't think a lot of Americans have taken the time or considerable trouble to find the difference between Shiite and Sunni or Saddam and Osama."
