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Low OpinionDid Iraq have weapons of mass destruction? It doesn't matter.

By Michael KinsleyPosted Thursday, June 19, 2003, at 12:45 PM ET

Why are we even bothering to keep looking for those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? At this point, what difference does it make whether we find them or not? Trying to find them serves two ostensible purposes: One is to prevent them from being used, and the other is to settle the argument about whether they exist. But neither purpose really applies any longer.

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As we are belatedly noticing, other nations are closer to having a usable nuclear weapon than Iraq. The claim was that nuclear and other weapons were especially dangerous in the hands of a malevolent madman like Saddam Hussein. Now Saddam is gone. Iraq is not quite yet the gentle, loving democracy promised by Bush administration propaganda. But its government, or lack of one, is hardly the rogue nuclear power we must fear the most.

As for settling the argument about WMD as a justification for the war, that argument is already settled. It's obvious that the Bush administration had no good evidence to back up its dire warnings. And even if months of desperate searching ultimately turn up a thing or two, this will hardly vindicate the administration's claim to have known it all along. The administration itself in effect now agrees that actually finding the weapons doesn't matter. It asserts that the war can be justified on humanitarian grounds alone, and that Saddam may have destroyed those weapons on his way out the door. (Exactly what we wanted him to do, by the way, now repositioned as a dirty trick.) These are not the sorts of things you say if you know those weapons exist. And if it doesn't matter that they don't seem to exist, it cannot logically matter if they do.

The general citizenry doesn't seem to care whether those weapons are discovered or not. Americans tell pollsters they do not mind that WMD haven't materialized and are not even withholding judgment while the search goes on. Some now believe the war was justified on other grounds. Some believe the weapons exist despite the lack of evidence. Some actually believe that WMD have been discovered. And some even believe that the Bush administration outright lied about WMD, but they don't care.

According to a Harris poll out Wednesday, a majority of Americans still think the Bush administration was telling the truth before the war when it said it had hard evidence of WMD. A Knight Ridder poll released last weekend reports that a third of the populace believes that the weapons have been discovered. A Fox News poll last week found that almost half of Americans feel that the administration was "intentionally misleading" about Iraq's weapons, but more than two-thirds think the war was justified anyway. A Gallup Poll released Wednesday concludes that almost 9 out of 10 Americans still think Saddam had or was close to having WMD.

By now, WMD have taken on a mythic role in which fact doesn't play much of a part. The phrase itself—"weapons of mass destruction"—is more like an incantation than a description of anything in particular. The term is a new one to almost everybody, and the concern it officially embodies was on almost no one's radar screen until recently. Unofficially, "weapons of mass destruction" are to George W. Bush what fairies were to Peter Pan. He wants us to say, "We DO believe in weapons of mass destruction. We DO believe. We DO." If we all believe hard enough, they will be there. And it's working.

The most striking thing about polls like these isn't how many people believe or disbelieve some unproven factual assertion or prediction, but how few give the only correct answer, which is "don't know." In the Fox News poll, vast majorities expressed certitude one way or the other about the existence of WMD in Iraq, the likelihood of peace in the Middle East, and so on. Those who voted "not sure" (an even more tempting cop-out than the pollsters' usual "don't know") rarely broke 20 percent and usually hovered around 10. Four-fifths or more were sure about everything.

As someone who manufactures opinions for a living, it is my job to be sure. And my standards for the ingredients of an opinion are necessarily low. There may be a few ancient pundits such as George Will who still follow the traditional guild practices: days in the library making notes on 3-by-5 cards, half a dozen lunches at the club with key sources, an hour spent alone in silence with a martini and one's thoughts—and only then does a perfectly modulated opinion take its lovely shape. Most of us have no time for that anymore. It's a quick surf around the Net, a flip of the coin, and out pops an opinion, ready-to-go except perhaps for a bit of extra last-minute coarsening.

Still, even the most modern major generalist among the professional commentariat likes to have a little something in the way of knowledge as he or she scatters opinions like bird seed. The general public, or at least the part of it that deals with pollsters, is not so cowardly. Most people, it seems, will happily state a belief on a question of fact that nobody knows the answer to, and then just as happily do a double back flip from that shaky platform into a pool of opinions about which they are "sure."

Pollsters themselves, and the media who report their findings deadpan, are partly responsible for this. Every news report about a poll result reinforces the impression that opinion untethered to reality is valid or even patriotic (and to be "not sure" is shameful). The modern pundit culture is also partly to blame, I suppose, with its emphasis on televised argumentation. Viewers do not always grasp the difference between low standards and no standards at all.

Are there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Sure there are—in every sense that matters, reality not being one of them.

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Michael Kinsley is a columnist for the Washington Post and the founding editor of Slate.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

…The usual argument is that people just don't know the truth or, in a sinister variation on this, have been terribly misled by leaders, the media, et al. Kinsley's new tack is to say, in effect, that the results of polls he finds unfavorable are simply unfathomable or, at least, he is not about to attempt to fathom them. But as with most of the discomfort about American public opinion being solidly behind the US campaign in Iraq, Kinsley's assessment is fundamentally flawed by a misunderstanding of both the US policy and strategy and the degree to which that policy and strategy reflect and give force to the opinions of Americans -- rather than the polled opinions reflecting an uninformed, misled or simply foolish willingness to support whatever the US policy happens to be. What most Americans "get" and "got" before Bush sent so much as a single additional platoon of US troops to Kuwait was that Saddam was (a) nasty and dangerous; (b) implacably hostile to the US; (c) unwilling to give up WMDs or anything else without being compelled to do so. What they also "got" and still "get" is that after the 9/11 attacks displayed both the great vulnerability of the US to this potentially devastating form of warfare and the extraordinary venom of anti-US terrorists, there could be no further US tolerance of either (a) any form of aid to such terrorists or (b) the existence of WMD that could be supplied to, or fall into the hands of, such terrorists...

--Publius

(To reply, click here)

...as a former (and current) supporter of regime change, i welcome full and open hearings on the intelligence and political factors which led to the US decision to go to war in iraq. we have a right to know if . . .
- an honest difference of opinion on WMD intelligence existed, or ambiguities were ignored to present a worst case scenario
- whether the intelligence community created any evidence leading to our decision to oppose iraq
- whether any elected officials, whether they are republicans or democrats, office of the president or congressional, were aware of or colluded in misrepresentations (if any) about iraqi intelligence.
i understand something less than full and open hearings are planned, with information being withheld "in the interest of national security." however, just as i believe in fair and open judicial proceedings for all terrorism detainees, i think the taxpayers who paid for this war have a right to an audit concerning how and why their money was spent - the political and intelligence factors that led to the money being spent. regarding iraq itself, i also believe that tens of thousands of civilian lives have been saved by regime change; that WMD will likely be found before year end; and that the iranian students demonstrating (and being beaten and imprisoned) this month were emboldened to believe democracy and human rights are possible by what they've observed recently in iraq. dictators can be overthrown. but i also want to know if my government deceived me. these are fair and balanced opinions, aren't they?

--baltimore-aureole

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…As a fairly ardent hawk, I have never thought that we knew exactly where Saddam's weapons were, just that he still had them. I thought this because I couldn't believe that he would have destroyed them without trumpeting the fact to the world. Even if that logic is wrong, Saddam's larger danger has always been his malevolence coupled with his wealth and insatiable desire to rule the Middle East. The recognition of that larger danger, coupled with the widely-held (although not on these boards) impression that the fall of Saddam is a good thing for Iraqis even with a temporary occupation, is responsible for the basically ho-hum reaction to the still-unaccounted for weapons. As doves were desperate to do before the war, I'm willing to give the searchers (not inspectors)a significant amount of time before declaring the WMD question settled.

--Larry

(To reply, click here)

Kinsley writes: "As for settling the argument about WMD as a justification for the war, that argument is already settled. It's obvious that the Bush administration had no good evidence to back up its dire warnings." Obvious to whom? To Kinsley, yes. To me, yes. But to most Americans? I doubt it, no matter what polls of generally uninformed people say at this time. In a poll a few months back, some 62% of the respondents thought it likely that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. This tells us nothing except that the Bush administration's dishonest efforts to morph Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were largely successful. Most Americans follow this stuff only on the surface, if at all. But what if Americans knew that the Bush operatives knowingly lied about the various WMD issues? Or if they knew that Bush officials, such as Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, did, as reports suggest, browbeat CIA agents and others into "molding" their intel findings to fit the Bush agenda? Wouldn't most Americans care deeply about that? Wouldn't they be outraged? Wouldn't there actually be a groundswell of calls for impeachment? Maybe I'm dreaming, but I would really like to think that most Americans DO care about such things, and that the WMD issues DO matter. For if there are no WMD's, the Bush administration has some serious explaining to do. Or at least they should. When our government concocts the main reason offered for "preemptively" invading, conquering and occupying another country, it's time for a national gut check--do we care about presidential lying to justify starting a war, or don't we?

--TC3

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(6/19)

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