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Political Science

Who's to Blame?

Poorly worded opinion polls exaggerated the extent to which Americans blamed Saddam Hussein for the 9/11 attacks

The first formal study to investigate U.S. public opinion about who was to blame for the 9-11 attacks challenges a popular theory.

The story of widespread misconceptions about Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's role in the September 2001 attacks grabbed headlines around the first anniversary of the attacks. This discovery-noted in national surveys at the time-led many commentators to suggest that Americans who blamed Saddam instead of Osama bin Laden had somehow been misled by the Bush administration. Instead, political science professor Scott Althaus says the levels of misperception were even higher in the months before President Bush began building a public case for war against Iraq, and these levels "were artificially inflated by the way those survey questions were worded."

Althaus says the reason the public assigned culpability to Saddam can be attributed to two things: American's predisposition to believing Saddam was the culprit, and the wording and format of polling questions put to them. These questions overstated the degree of misperception that Saddam was the villain behind Sept. 11.

"In other words, this mistaken belief was not a product of the Bush administration's information campaign," says Althaus. "Instead, the Bush administration inherited and played into a favorable climate of public opinion, which may have greatly facilitated its task of building public support for war against Iraq."

The earliest surveys in the days immediately following Sept. 11 showed that Americans spontaneously mentioned Osama bin Laden as the main person responsible for the attacks. After September 2001, pollsters switched from recording spontaneous responses to presenting respondents with "forced-choice" questions. This switch, "probably made in order to more efficiently process the survey data, had the unintended effect of exaggerating the degree to which Americans saw a connection between Hussein and the attacks," Althaus says.

"Saddam was widely seen as a bad guy by ordinary Americans since the Gulf War of 1991. He later tried to assassinate former President Bush and was regularly bombed by U.S. and British planes long before 9/11 for violations of the no-fly zone. Thus, the stage was set for people to believe that Saddam would try to strike back using terrorism."

December 2004