Head flackster Mark A. Schulman, the president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, says that it doesn't matter whether 30% of the American people believe, without evidence, that there is a link between Iraq and Osama bin Laden.
"It's the general thrust of things, the symbolism and the ideas those symbols evoke," Mr. Schulman said. "That's what people take away with them."
"To say that there is no involvement of Saddam Hussein in Sept. 11 is implicitly to question what our leaders are saying," said Mr. Schulman. "And that is to start down a road toward suspicion and Watergate-like politics that no one wants."
So the fact that the government is lying to the people does not matter, because we do not want to suspect the government.
This article is very revealing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/02/weekinreview/02ZELL.html
March 2, 2003 How Americans Link Iraq and Sept. 11 By TOM ZELLER
THE results of a Knight-Ridder poll conducted in early January seemed lifted from one of Jay Leno's man-in-the-street interviews. "As far as you know," one question asked, "how many of the Sept. 11 terrorist hijackers were Iraqi citizens?" Fifty percent said that one or more were.
Such findings might reasonably be called discouraging. None of the hijackers were from Iraq. But dismissing the results as simple ignorance â?? consigning such misapprehension to that same segment of American society that can't name the vice president or find Canada on a map â?? is too easy.
The view that Iraq, or more specifically, Saddam Hussein, had a hand in the Sept. 11 attacks was widespread from the very beginning. Surveys have consistently shown that anywhere from a third to a half of the country believe in a direct link.
The polls themselves deserve some scrutiny.
"The substitution of just one word, or the order in which questions are asked, can have a profound effect on the results," said Mark A. Schulman, the president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. Asking someone, for instance, whether they think Mr. Hussein "helped the terrorists" in the Sept. 11 attacks, as the Pew Research Center did last October, will often yield more positive responses than will questions that ask if Mr. Hussein was "personally involved" in the attacks, as a Time/CNN poll did at roughly the same time. The former question provides a more plausible, more nebulous sense of remove from the act, Mr. Schulman explained, while the latter's language of personal involvement makes Mr. Hussein much more present in the enterprise.
"It puts blood on his hands," Mr. Schulman said.
But the vagaries of polling can't completely account for views that are, at least in light of the evidence thus far, wholly unproven and yet held dear by at least 30 percent of the nation.
Given his history, it was not unreasonable to assume that Mr. Hussein had blood on his hands from Sept. 11. The seesaw of intimations and refutations along those lines began almost immediately. Czech intelligence officials said for more than a year that they had credible evidence of a meeting in Prague between one Sept. 11 hijacker and an Iraqi agent. The Czech government later said the information was false. The Central Intelligence Agency tried to find Iraq's fingerprints on the anthrax sent to press and television offices in the months after the attacks, but no connection was found.
It might be understandable, then, if some portion of the population picked up only threads of these theories, and missed the later news debunking them. Even the suggested links between the Iraqi government and Al Qaeda operatives, made by the Bush administration since last summer, "can easily be interpreted to mean that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11," said Alan Wolfe, a professor of political science and Director for the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.
Americans may be famously ill-informed, Professor Wolfe continued, but "we ought not to expect that most Americans would know that the Baathists are secular and bin Laden is not, or that Saddam Hussein is too jealous of his power to share it with another person, or that bin Laden has targeted corrupt Arab governments as enemies of Islam."
The case can never be closed. The global crisscrossing of electronic wire transfers, the back-alley sale and resale of black market weapons, the transcontinental trade in toxic recipes, gases, spores and tubes â?? some turn in that maze might one day produce evidence that connects the dots, however indirectly, between Sept. 11 and Mr. Hussein.
"We know Americans aren't attentive to the details of foreign policy," said Karlyn H. Bowman, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who specializes in public opinion research. "But they've known that Saddam was a thug for a long time and that may contribute to a belief that he was somehow involved, given other things he's done."
The flip side, of course, is that in most polls, the majority of Americans either do not presume a link between Mr. Hussein and the Sept. 11 attacks, or they simply say they don't know. Given how complicated, and conflicting, the information is, it may actually be surprising that belief in a link persists only among a stubborn third.
"It's the general thrust of things, the symbolism and the ideas those symbols evoke," Mr. Schulman said. "That's what people take away with them."
If that's true, then assuming anything less than the worst of Mr. Hussein, particularly with the monthslong buildup toward war, may simply seem unpatriotic to a sizable chunk of the populace.
"To say that there is no involvement of Saddam Hussein in Sept. 11 is implicitly to question what our leaders are saying," Mr. Schulman said. "And that is to start down a road toward suspicion and Watergate-like politics that no one wants."
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