A national state of confusion
The Bush propaganda machine has convinced Americans that Saddam and the no-longer-mentioned Osama are the same person -- and the polls prove it.
By Kane Pryor
Feb. 6, 2003 | In mid-January, an underreported political opinion poll provided a troubling account of the effectiveness of the Bush war machine's propaganda arm. It was an Orwellian moment, the sort of thing that should make Noam Chomsky want to sit down and rewrite the epilogue for the next printing of "Manufacturing Consent." However, as predicted by Chomsky's media propaganda model, the poll was destined to never really penetrate the national consciousness. It makes Secretary of State Colin Powell's Wednesday address to the U.N. Security Council seem like little more than a theatrical subplot. And it shows clearly what may be the price of ignorance when the subject is war.
At the end of the first week of January, the Princeton Survey Research Associates polled more than 1,200 Americans on behalf of the Knight Ridder newspaper chain. They asked a very simple question: "To the best of your knowledge, how many of the September 11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens?"
It should be impossible for a person who has lived through the last 16 months not to know the name and face of Mohamed Atta, believed to be the lead hijacker, and to have at least some nebulous sense of the identity of the hijackers. For much of this time, the nation in toto was umbilically joined to the media's saturation coverage, with hourly "terror alerts," scrolling "terror" news tickers, and panoplies of talking heads sprouting a confetti of 10-second sound bites. Surely some information must have been imparted.
The Knight Ridder survey appears to reveal a quite different reality. Of those surveyed, only 17 percent knew the correct answer: that none of the hijackers were Iraqi. Forty-four percent of Americans believe that most or some of the hijackers were Iraqi; another 6 percent believe that one of the hijackers was a citizen of that most notorious node in the axis of evil. That leaves 33 percent who did not know enough to offer an answer.
One would have thought that the answer to this question had long ago made its way through our societal omni-consciousness, that it would now be firmly embedded in the hippocampal memory of nearly every American -- even in the memories of the socio-politically uninterested, who tend to fare better when questioned on the identities of the contestants on "Joe Millionaire," "The Bachelorette" or the latest incarnation of "Survivor."
Sound bites notwithstanding, Americans undoubtedly shared a commonality of experience. It is not at all unreasonable to conclude that the suspected national identities of the hijackers -- 15 Saudis, one Egyptian, one Lebanese, and two from the United Arab Emirates -- must have been heard or read by everybody on at least several occasions. From there the raw information must have made its way to innumerable lunch rooms, bars and family dinner tables across the country, where it was debated and discussed. Though it was somewhat subversive and unpatriotic to ask why, there was an insatiable national hunger to know who. Even the realpolitik diplomatic strategy of the Bush administration -- to play down the frequency of dots leading to Saudi Arabia -- should not have penetrated sufficiently to impede free access to information that was clearly in the public domain.
In another question contained within the same poll, asking whether there was a relationship between al-Qaida and Iraq, 65 percent of the Americans surveyed believe that the two are closely collaborating allies. In fact, there is scant evidence to suggest a linkage in any form, despite unrelenting efforts by the Bush administration to demonstrate otherwise. Indeed, those with a scholarly knowledge of al-Qaida have consistently spoken of al-Qaida's enmity for the secular rule of Saddam Hussein. In propaganda, however, accusation confers nine-tenths of guilt.
Today we apparently hurtle toward a predestined American invasion of Iraq. At best, the administration hawks have only lukewarm support among the American public, with various polls suggesting that less than one-third of Americans would support military action outside the aegis of the United Nations Security Council. Though we regularly hear talk of drawing together U.S. allies if the U.N. does not sanction war, the only materially committed members of that allegiance appear to be the British and the Australians. Similar recent polls in those nations reveal support of 13 percent and 6 percent, respectively -- thrusting leaders like Tony Blair and John Howard into politically hostile territory with their own citizenry should they choose to follow George W. Bush into non-U.N. battle.
The Knight Ridder poll raises the specter of an unsettling truth. It suggests that whatever support there is for a war against Iraq, it owes much to the erroneous belief of at least half of the American people that it was Saddam Hussein's operatives who flew the planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
If it is disturbing to conclude that many Americans may be supporting a war on the basis of a falsehood, it is potentially even more disturbing to consider how this falsehood came to be. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, have received more news coverage than any other single event in history. How could it possibly be that in less than 18 months this event has become a victim of gross historical revisionism? |
