COALITION OF THE CONFUSED

The next time an Iraq hawk comes up to you and says a vast majority of Americans support a war with or without a UN resolution, make sure you have a notecard in your pocket with these two paragraphs from yesterday's NYT poll report on Iraq:

Although Mr. Bush's statements at his news conference last week appear to have increased the nation's support for a war, he apparently did not succeed with one argument: convincing more Americans that Mr. Hussein had a role in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The poll found that 45 percent of Americans said Mr. Hussein was "personally involved" in the attacks, a number essentially unchanged from a month ago. (emphasis mine)

Pop quiz, everybody: If the media was doing its job (the administration too, btw), what would that percentage be? (answer: probably around 4-5 percent, you gotta account for at least some righteous idiocy from Americans in the face of absolute fact).

If Bush is gonna force a bullshit war on us, could he at least have the decency to force a bullshit war on us on the merits, rather than playing a game of confusion in league with the lapdog American media? The entire game of gaining support for a preemptive war in Iraq has been to cultivate 9/11-related fear, and use confusion and ambiguity to apply it to something completely unrelated.

The big question for George W Bush and his buddies: If you "trust the people", as you often like to say, why are you draping your case for war in a fog of 9/11 fear cultivation, rather than responsibly arguing the case for war on its merits??? If you're so right about this, then you can "trust the people" to agree with you without resorting to scaring them with unrelated bogeymen, right?

Here's the reason, perhaps: In the United Kingdom, the case for war has been made largely on its merits. At this moment, unconditional support in the UK for war in Iraq is at 19 percent.