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Polls, not Bush Administration, helped shape Americans' bias against Saddam
Andrea
Lynn, Humanities Editor
217-333-2177; andreal@illinois.edu
9/9/2004
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. —
Why were so many Americans, as early as the first anniversary of Sept.
11, convinced that Saddam Hussein was behind the terrorist attacks in
the United States? Did their mistaken belief that the Iraqi dictator
was responsible for the attacks result from the Bush administration’s
information campaign to convince the public to go to war in Iraq, or
was something else at work?
A new study – the first to investigate U.S. public opinion about
who was to blame for the Sept. 11 attacks – finds that there was,
indeed, “something else.”
“News coverage and presidential rhetoric may have replaced Osama
with Saddam over time,” write the authors of the study, “but
Saddam was on the short list of most-likely suspects from the beginning
for most Americans.”
The authors say that the high levels of “public misperception”
about Saddam’s culpability can be attributed to two things: the
American public’s predisposition to believing Saddam was the culprit,
and the wording and format of polling questions put to them, which overstated
the degree of misperception that Saddam was the villain behind Sept.
11.
“In other words, this mistaken belief was not a product of the
Bush administration’s information campaign,” the researchers
wrote. “Instead, the Bush administration inherited and played
into a favorable climate of public opinion, which may have greatly facilitated
its task of building public support for war against Iraq.”
Moreover, the levels of misperception – most polls showed that
majorities of Americans held this mistaken belief about Saddam –
“were artificially inflated by the way those survey questions
were worded,” said Scott Althaus, one of the researchers and a
professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Devon Largio, a law
student at Vanderbilt University, was co-author.
Their findings will appear in the October issue of PS: Political Science
& Politics in an article titled “When Osama Became Saddam:
Origins and Consequences of the Change in America’s Public Enemy
#1.” The article will be posted on the journal's Web
site on Sept. 10. It is on Althaus’ Web
site.
Last May, as a senior at Illinois and under the guidance of Althaus,
Largio released her own study on the Bush administration’s rationales
for going to war in Iraq. Charting reasons voiced by the Bush administration,
Congress and the American media during the 2001-2002 pre-war period,
Largio found 27 stated rationales. Her honors
thesis continues to receive wide coverage by the news media.
To clarify whether misperceptions about Saddam were a product of the
Bush administration’s effort to build popular support for going
to war, the researchers charted the changing levels of public attention
given to bin Laden and Saddam in U.S. news coverage and in Bush’s
public statements. They also examined the full range of pollsters’
survey findings that appear to reveal widespread misperceptions about
the link between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks.
According to the researchers, the story of widespread popular misconceptions
about Saddam’s role in the September 2001 attacks grabbed headlines
in the national media around the first anniversary of the attacks. This
“discovery” was startling at the time, the researchers wrote,
and many commentators suggested that the majorities of Americans who
blamed Saddam for the attacks had somehow been misled by the Bush administration.
In contrast to this popular account, Althaus and Largio found that the
number of Americans willing to blame Saddam “has been dropping
ever since the first days following 9/11.” After examining every
publicly available survey question that asked Americans whether Hussein
might be responsible for the attacks, they concluded that this “mistaken
belief was already widespread among Americans long before President
Bush began publicly linking Saddam Hussein with the war on terror.”
In fact, nearly seven months before the Sept. 11 attacks, an Opinion
Dynamics poll found that 73 percent of Americans believed it was very
or somewhat likely that Saddam would organize terrorist attacks on U.S.
targets to retaliate for the air strikes that recently had been conducted
in Iraq by U.S. and British air forces.
“Saddam was widely seen as a bad guy by ordinary Americans since
the Gulf War of 1991,” Althaus said. “He later tried to
assassinate former President Bush and was regularly bombed by U.S. and
British planes long before 9/11 for violations of the no-fly zone. Thus,
the stage was set for people to believe that Saddam would try to strike
back using terrorism.”
The authors also show that the wording of opinion surveys exaggerated
how widespread these misperceptions were. The very earliest surveys
in the days immediately after Sept. 11 showed that Americans spontaneously
mentioned Osama bin Laden as the main person responsible for the attacks.
Other questions in those surveys asked only about Saddam and “forced
survey respondents to pick an option. In response to those questions,
as many as eight in 10 Americans appeared willing to believe Saddam
could have had a hand in the terror attacks.”
After September 2001, pollsters switched from recording spontaneous
responses to presenting respondents with “forced-choice”
questions. This switch, “probably made in order to more efficiently
process the survey data, had the unintended effect of exaggerating the
degree to which Americans saw a connection between Hussein and the attacks,”
Althaus said.
In addition, most polls only permitted respondents to assess the likelihood
that Saddam was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. Only one poll allowed
respondents a range of options. This poll, sponsored by the Program
on International Policy Attitudes, revealed that about one in five Americans
believed Saddam was directly involved in the attacks.
“It appears that rather than becoming duped, as the popular account
has it, the American public has gradually grown more critical of the
idea that Hussein had a hand in 9/11,” the researchers wrote.
“Rather than showing a gullible public blindly accepting the rationales
offered by an administration bent on war, our analysis reveals a self-correcting
public that has grown ever more doubtful of Hussein’s culpability
since the 9/11 attacks.”
