Global Policy Forum

By Frank Davies

A third of the American public believes U.S. forces found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, according to a recent poll, and 22 percent said Iraq actually used chemical or biological weapons. But no such weapons have been found, nor is there evidence they were used recently in Iraq.

Before the war, half of those polled in a survey said Iraqis were among the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001. But most of them were from Saudi Arabia. None were Iraqis.

How could so many people be so wrong about information that has dominated the news for nearly two years? The poll results startled the pollsters who conducted and analyzed the surveys.

"It's a striking finding," said Steve Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, which asked the weapons questions during a May 14-18 poll of 1,265 respondents." Given the intensive news coverage and high levels of public attention," he said, "this level of misinformation suggests some Americans may be avoiding having an experience of cognitive dissonance." That is, having their beliefs conflict with the facts.

Kull said the poll's data showed the mistaken belief that weapons of mass destruction were found "is substantially greater among those who favored the war."

Pollsters and political analysts see several reasons for the gap between fact and belief: the public's short attention span on foreign news,fragmentary or conflicting media reports that lacked depth or skepticism,and Bush administration efforts to sell a war by over simplifying the threat.

"Most people get little whiffs and fragments of news, not in any organized way," said Thomas Mann, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank. "And there have been a lot of conflicting reports on the weapons."

Polls show support for Bush and the war, though 40 percent in the May surveyfound U.S. officials were "misleading" in some of their justifications for war. A majority, 55 percent, said they were not misleading.

The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.