The public’s perception of the Iraq war correlation with 9-11
I ran across an interesting tidbit of info while looking for something else today on Google – regarding how people came to believe that Iraq was behind 9-11. Popular belief is that only 3% of people surveyed shortly after 9-11 believed that Iraq was behind 9-11, and furthermore that the reason people believed that Iraq had ties to 9-11 were because of how the admin allegedly tried to deliberately blur the lines on the connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda – with AQ of course being the terrorist group behind 9-11:
Polling data show that right after Sept. 11, 2001, when Americans were asked open-ended questions about who was behind the attacks, only 3 percent mentioned Iraq or Hussein. But by January of this year, attitudes had been transformed. In a Knight Ridder poll, 44 percent of Americans reported that either “most” or “some” of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens. The answer is zero.
That assertion is wrong. Click here to see the poll saved via screencap. (I did a screen cap because the copying/pasting the figures made the poll answers slide all over the post in the wrong place) Note the 9/13/01 numbers.
Interesting, eh? What you see there is actually a slight decline in the belief that SH was involved in any way with 9-11 from the first poll taken 9/13/01 to the one taken in Aug 2003 — and as you know at least a year or so of that time included the President making his case for the removal of Saddam Hussein from power because of his WMDs and ties to terrorists like Al Qaeda.
This info may not be new to some people, but it is to me and I wanted to pass it along to you so you can have it at your disposal the next time someone tries to make the bogus claim that “only 3%” of people believed Saddam was behind 9-11 shortly after the attacks.
Now I just wonder how in the world anyone, so shortly after 9-11, would have thought that Saddam Hussein was behind 9-11? Think it had anything to do with our prior policies towards Iraq in the 1990s? Nah!