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...of them were from Iraq. Almost two-thirds thought that "Iraq and Al Qaeda--Osama bin Laden's organization--are allied and working together to plan new acts of terrorism." And two-thirds said that the United States should "take military action to disarm Iraq and ensure that it cannot threaten other countries with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons."
It is hard to know exactly how far these beliefs were causally linked--to what extent the plurality belief that some or most of the hijackers were from Iraq led to the majority belief that Iraq was allied with Al Qaeda and from that in turn to the majority belief that the United States should take military action to disarm Iraq. But the combination of support for military action with such striking ignorance and misinformation is troubling--the more so, considering that two-thirds of the same Knight-Kidder respondents thought they had "a good understanding of the arguments for and against going to war with Iraq."
Strong feelings undergirded by scanty knowledge are hardly new to American public opinion about foreign policy. In book and article of the mid-1950s, Harold Isaacs found among Americans a new awareness and sense of "worried urgency" about Asia, accompanied by images of the continent that were little more than "scratches on our minds." Much the same now could probably be said about American public opinion toward the Arab world. When Isaacs wrote, the United States was already waging war in Korea and would later do so in Vietnam. Now we have just finished waging war in Iraq. Whatever one's position on these wars, we think it worrisome that public attitudes toward them, whether supportive or critical, typically rest on such limited information. Is there some way of doing better--of glimpsing better informed and more considered public opinion concerning America's role in the world?
One approach is Deliberative Polling, which surveys a random sample of...
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