File this away in the “use and misuse of public-opinion surveys” drawer. The Washington Post released a nationwide poll a few days ago and has been running stories since then exploring specific issues. Today’s front-page piece attempts to knock the Bush administration’s Iraq policy by suggesting that its recent argument — that Iraq has become the central battleground in the war on terrorism — isn’t selling with the American people.
This is the kind of thing you could get away with before the Internet, but now that the newspaper’s actual poll results are easily searched right after reading its official spin of the results, the snow job is harder to pull off.
The Post article is entitled “Survey Shows Skepticism about Iraq: Most Americans Polled Don’t Believe Conflict Is Key Fight in War on Terrorism.” The title accurately reflects ithe central claim:
Since Sept. 7, when Bush addressed the nation to build support for the war in Iraq, he and his aides have described Iraq as “the central front” in the war on terrorism. “We will fight this war against terror until it is won,” Bush said recently in one typical speech. “We are fighting on many fronts. Iraq is now the central front.” But the poll found that, although 61 percent of the respondents believe Iraq is part of the war on terrorism, just 14 percent think it is the “most important” part. This doubt — shared by some experts in military strategy — poses a potential problem for Bush, because it indicates that a large majority of Americans disagrees with his main argument for justifying the continuing occupation of Iraq, which has proven costlier and bloodier than was generally predicted before the war.
Later, the story states that “the public’s decoupling of Iraq from the war on terrorism is ominous for Bush, because the high marks he has received for fighting terrorism have helped to hold together support for the actions in Iraq, several polling analysts suggested.”
These passages in the Post article are totally unsupported by the actual findings of the newspaper’s poll.
First off, the survey found that a solid majority of Americans still support the war and still believe that the decision to go to war was the correct choice. Second, there is no “public decoupling of Iraq from the war on terrorism.” It simply isn’t true that 61 percent of respondents believe Iraq is just “part” of the war on terrorism (though this by itself would seem to disprove the “decoupling” thesis). If you look at the poll itself, the 61 percent number is the percentage of respondents who agreed that Iraq was an “important” part of the war on terrorism. They simply didn’t agree that it was the “most important,” probably because they viewed the several theaters of conflict — at home, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Africa, etc. — to be roughly equal in importance.
So what? That’s rational, and it doesn’t even contradict the president’s premise that the battle in Iraq has become the “central front.” He didn’t say that the Iraqi conflict was necessarily more important than the other ones, such as policing terrorist incidents in the U.S. He simply made the common-sense observation that the Iraqi conflict has taken center stage right now. This is no different from observing that in July 1863 the battle of Gettysburg represented the “central front” in the Civil War while not necessarily suggesting that it was more important in strategic terms than what was going on in the west (and it wasn’t, by the way).
The percentage of Americans who even today, when the recent news out of Iraq has been bad, believe that the war was a mistake and was unrelated to the war on terrorism — the position, in other words, of most of the Democrats running for president and much of the prestige press in New York and Washington — is exceedingly small. For example, here’s one question from the poll:
Do you think the United States should keep its military forces in Iraq until civil order is restored there, even if that means continued U.S. military casualties; or do you think the United States should withdraw its military forces from Iraq in order to avoid further U.S. military casualties, even if that means civil order is not restored there?
The “cut and run” option is favored by only 38 percent, while 58 percent favor staying in Iraq even if more casualties ensue. Basically, Americans are grown-ups about this, which makes Dennis Kucinich and his ilk the silly, rebellious teenagers of the tableau.
All in all, a thoroughly mendacious and unhelpful treatment by the Post of the findings of its own poll, which in fact offered a lot of insights if you were willing to actually read it.