Deep Suspicion: Iraq, Misperception, and Partisanship

By Yaeli Bloch-Elkon and Robert Y. Shapiro

Future historians will long describe and debate the Iraq war, the American occupation of Iraq, and their aftermath. They will also debate what led to the U.S. invasion and the public's initial support for the war, which rested on the perceived need to unearth and capture Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" (WMDs), and suspicions of a connection between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorists who were responsible for the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. To this day, no WMDs have been found in Iraq-the Bush administration itself acknowledged their absence last fall-and senior administration officials such as former Secretary of State Colin Powell and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld have said there is no hard evidence for a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda predating the current al-Qaeda affiliate insurgency. Even so, a sizeable percentage of the public still believes that both existed.

Why did Americans misperceive the facts of Iraq's WMDs and links to al-Qaeda, and why has this misperception continued? A March 2005 ABC News Iraq war poll reported that fully 61 percent of the public still suspected Iraq of providing direct support to al-Qaeda before the war, and 21 percent even said that solid evidence was found for this. In addition, 56 percent still thought Iraq had WMDs before the war. So deep has the suspicion of Saddam Hussein been that in an NBC News poll in June 2004, 47 percent disagreed with the 9/11 Commission finding that the Iraqi government had not collaborated with al-Qaeda during the attacks.

We argue that this misperception is strongly connected to partisan conflict and polarization that has deepened in the United States in recent years. As the 2000 and 2004 elections showed, Americans are deeply divided on partisan lines when it comes to the performance of party leaders in government. The presidential elections were extraordinarily close, and both parties are now very evenly matched for control of both houses of Congress.

Steven Kull and his colleagues at the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) were the first to offer in-depth analysis of the issue of misperception and false beliefs about Iraq with reference to the war. Scott Althaus and Devon Largio subsequently focused on the misperception that had occurred at an earlier stage, arguing that even before the government started to talk about a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda, the public was ready to blame Saddam Hussein as well as the terrorist organization. In their view, the American public needed no convincing and was ready and willing to blame Saddam immediately after 9/11, when it was presented with the idea, long before the administration started to build further popular support for a war against Iraq. In short, according to Althaus and Largio, the Bush administration just played into a favorable climate of public opinion.