In the runup to the last election, I thought this survey from October 2004 was enormously important. While I'm not naive or proud enough to think that everyone who disagrees with me politically is an idiot, it's not often that you get empirical proof that a candidate's support on a vital issue is predicated on misinformation:



While it's hardly new or unique that people would willfully ignore facts when they conflict with their political worldview (and I have no doubt that the left is not immune to such lapses), this was a particularly striking example. It raises all sorts of interesting questions about mistrust of the media, where people get their information, and other such topics.

But for me, what hit home most was the tragedy that we had gone to war based on massive confusion. Whether or not Bush actively encouraged the impression that Saddam was connected to 9/11 (I think he did, but it's an arguable point), the entire administration most certainly expressed certainly that he had vast stocks of WMD. And having committed to sacrificing soldiers for that cause, Bush's supporters were unwilling to consider that they had been sold a bill of goods (also from the 10/2004 survey):



If voters at home were actively "suppressing awareness" of the realities on the ground in Iraq, I wondered, then what about the soldiers who were fighting and dying there? What did they tell themselves in response to the inevitable question of "What the hell am I doing here?"

Now we know.



While the troops aren't buying what Bush was selling in the march to war -- the threat of Saddam's alleged WMD -- they appear to have swallowed whole the thing that Bush himself never said explicitly (and even occasionally explicitly denied) but hoped people would infer: that Saddam had a hand in 9/11.

Because if you take that away, what's left? They don't believe the WMD angle. They aren't getting on board with the "spreading democracy" talking points. Fighting terror and avenging 9/11 is the only thing remaining. Believing that Saddam's Iraq wasn't an al Qaeda stronghold and that Saddam didn't bring down the WTC would be too horrible to comtemplate, as you trudge through another extended tour at best, and get shot at, wounded or killed at worst. Bush's supporters at home only have their consciences to protect from inconvenient facts -- for the troops in Iraq (people largely motivated by a desire to serve and protect America, not act as instruments of foreign policy), their entire day-to-day existences are founded on those illusions.

So I can hardly blame those serving in Iraq for believing that Saddam was bin Laden. But I can blame the administration for sending them there believing that, and later acting like it was all a big joke: