A Knight-Ridder article describes a recent poll showing that a majority of the US population opposes a unilateral attack on Iraq. The article provides links to the complete survey, but since it’s a large PDF file I didn’t try to download it at home. But a summary in the article provided some interesting points.
Two of my favorites:
- Two-thirds of the respondents said they thought they had a good grasp of the issues surrounding the Iraqi crisis, but closer questioning revealed large gaps in that knowledge. For instance, half of those surveyed said one or more of the Sept. 11 terrorist hijackers were Iraqi citizens. In fact, none was.
- The informed public is considerably less hawkish about war with Iraq than the public as a whole. Those who show themselves to be most knowledgeable about the Iraq situation are significantly less likely to support military action, either to remove Saddam from power or to disarm Iraq.
So the people that know what’s going on don’t want to set the Middle East on fire. That’s good. But half the peple don’t know as much as they think they do. I suppose that’s not surprising, but it is a little frightening. Dumbya and his droids like to rant about weapons of mass destruction in the hands of the Axis of Evil. But what about the largest arsenal of mass destruction in the world in the hands of a country whose citizens don’t bother to learn the facts before they support annihilation of another civilization? If we could find two other countries with as many morons as we have, we could start an Axis of Ignorance.