WHY WE WENT TO WAR….While I was over at Brendan’s site I noticed that he linked to an LA Times poll that asked a question I’ve long been curious about: what’s the main reason war supporters gave for supporting the war? Here are the answers they got on April 2, a couple of weeks after the war started:
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Disarm Hussein ? 23%
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Remove threat to America ? 14%
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Hussein violated U.N. Resolutions ? 12%
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Liberate Iraqi people ? 15%
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Hussein is evil ? 11%
The first three of these are all related to possession of WMD, I think, and they add up to 49%. The final two are related to liberating Iraq from an odious dictator, and they add up to 26%.
So, roughly speaking, by a margin of 2 to 1 war supporters felt that it was possession of WMD (either now or in the future) that was the main reason for going to war. Liberation was a very weak second.
I wonder how they feel now?
(And despite the fact that half of all Americans apparently think Saddam was behind 9/11, that didn’t even show up as one of the top five answers in the Times poll. Isn’t that peculiar? I mean, if I thought Saddam was behind 9/11, I sure as hell would have listed that as the main reason I wanted to invade his country.)
