WASHINGTON -
Three out of four self-described supporters of President
George W Bush still believe pre-war Iraq had weapons of
mass destruction (WMD) or active programs to produce
them, and that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein gave
"substantial support" to al-Qaeda terrorists, according
to a survey released Thursday.
Moreover, as many
or more Bush supporters hold those beliefs today than
they did several months ago, before the publication of a
series of well-publicized official government reports
that debunked both notions.
Those are among the
most striking findings of the survey, which was
conducted in mid-October by the University of Maryland's
Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) and
Knowledge Networks, a California-based polling firm.
The survey, which polled the views of nearly 900
randomly chosen respondents equally divided between Bush
supporters and those intending to vote for Democratic
Senator John Kerry in November's presidential election,
found a yawning gap in the world views, particularly as
regards pre-war Iraq, between the two groups.
"It is normal during elections for supporters of
presidential candidates to have fundamental
disagreements about values or strategies," said an
analysis produced by PIPA. But "the current election is
unique in that Bush supporters and Kerry supporters have
profoundly different perceptions of reality. In the face
of a stream of high-level assessments about pre-war
Iraq, Bush supporters cling to the refuted beliefs that
Iraq had WMD or supported al-Qaeda."
Indeed, the
only issue on which the survey found broad agreement
between the two sets of voters was on the question of
whether the administration itself actively propagated
the misconceptions about Iraq's WMD and connections to
al-Qaeda.
"One of the reasons that Bush
supporters have these [erroneous] beliefs is that they
perceive the Bush administration confirming them," noted
PIPA director Steven Kull. "Interestingly, this is one
point on which Bush and Kerry supporters agree."
The survey also found a major gap between Bush's
stated positions on a number of international issues and
what his supporters believe that position to be. A
strong majority of Bush backers believe, for example,
that the president supports a range of global treaties
and institutions, which he is actually on record as
opposing.
On pre-war Iraq, the survey asked each
respondent questions about WMD and links to al-Qaeda on
three levels: 1) What the respondents themselves
believed about the two issues; 2) What they believed
"most experts" had concluded about them; and 3) What
they believed the Bush administration was saying about
them.
The survey found 72% of Bush supporters
believe either that Iraq had actual WMD (47%) or a major
program for making them (25%), despite the widespread
media coverage in early October of the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA's) Duelfer Report, the final
word on the subject by the US$1 billion, 15-month
investigation by the Iraq Survey Group.
It
concluded Saddam had dismantled all of his WMD programs
shortly after the 1991 Gulf War and had never tried to
reconstitute them. Nonetheless, 56% of Bush supporters
said they thought most experts currently believe Iraq
had actual WMD, and 57% said they thought the Duelfer
Report had concluded that Iraq either had WMD (19%) or a
major WMD program (38%).
Only 26% of Kerry
supporters, by contrast, said they believed that pre-war
Iraq had either actual WMD or a WMD program, and only
18% said they believed "most experts" agreed with those
two possibilities.
Similar results were found
with respect to Saddam's alleged support for al-Qaeda, a
theory that has been most persistently asserted by Vice
President Dick Cheney, but that was thoroughly debunked
by the final report of the bipartisan 9-11 Commission
earlier this summer.
Seventy-five percent of
Bush supporters said they believed Iraq was providing
"substantial" support to al-Qaeda, with 20% asserting
Baghdad was directly involved in the September 11
attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Sixty-three
percent of Bush supporters even believed that clear
evidence of such support has been found, and 60%
believed "most experts" have reached the same
conclusion.
By contrast, only 30% of Kerry
supporters said they believe such a link existed and
that most experts agree.
But large majorities of
both Bush and Kerry supporters agree that the
administration is saying Iraq had WMD and was providing
substantial support to al-Qaeda. In regard to WMD, those
majorities have actually grown since last summer,
according to PIPA.
Remarkably, asked whether the
US should have gone to war with Iraq if US intelligence
had concluded Baghdad did not have a WMD program and was
not supporting al-Qaeda, 58% of Bush supporters said no,
and 61% said they assumed the president would also not
have gone to war under those circumstances.
"To
support the president and to accept that he took the US
to war based on mistaken assumptions," said Kull,
"likely creates substantial cognitive dissonance and
leads Bush supporters to suppress awareness of
unsettling information about pre-war Iraq."
Kull
added that this "cognitive dissonance" could also help
explain other remarkable findings in the survey,
particularly with respect to Bush supporters'
misperceptions about the president's own positions.
In particular, majorities of Bush supporters
incorrectly assumed he supports multilateral approaches
to various international issues, including the
Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) (69%), the
land mine treaty (72%), and the Kyoto Protocol to curb
greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global
warming (51%).
In all of these cases, majorities
of Bush supporters said they favored the positions that
they imputed, incorrectly, to the president. Large
majorities of Kerry supporters, on the other hand,
showed they knew both their candidate's and Bush's
positions on the same issues.
Bush supporters
were also found to hold misperceptions regarding
international support for the president and his
policies. Despite a steady flow over the past year of
official statements by foreign governments and
public-opinion polls showing strong opposition to the
Iraq war, less than one-third of Bush supporters
believed that most people in foreign countries opposed
Washington having gone to war.
Two-thirds said
they believed foreign views were either evenly divided
on the war (42%) or that the majority of foreigners
actually favored the war (26%). Three of every four
Kerry supporters, on the other hand, said they
understood that most of the rest of the world opposed
the war.
Kull, who has been analyzing US public
opinion on foreign-policy issues for two decades, said
misperceptions of Bush supporters showed, if anything,
the hold the president has over his loyalists. "The
roots of the Bush supporters' resistance to information
very likely lie in the traumatic experience of 9/11 and
equally into the near pitch-perfect leadership that
President Bush showed in its immediate wake," he said.
"This appears to have created a powerful bond
between Bush and his supporters - and an idealized image
of the president that makes it difficult for his
supporters to imagine that he could have made incorrect
judgements before the war, that world public opinion
would be critical of his policies or that the president
could hold foreign-policy positions that are at odds
with his supporters."
