OxBlog

# Posted 12:08 AM by Ariel David Adesnik

SPINNING THE POLLS: The WaPo reports that

A majority of Americans believe President Bush either lied or deliberately exaggerated evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction in order to justify war, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

If you scroll down a ways, you find out that 21% believe Bush lied while 31% believe he exaggerated without lying. Putting those numbers together to create a majority seems rather suspicious. If the WaPo wanted, it could just as easily have run a headline that emphasized a different finding from its most recent poll: that 68% of Americans think Bush really believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. The WaPo also reports that

the president's declining ratings related to Iraq were most striking. Approval of his handling of the situation there has fallen to 47 percent, down 8 percentage points in the past three weeks.

Actually, there's nothing particularly striking about that. If you look at the supplementary data provided on the WaPo website, you discover that Bush's rating on Iraq is almost exactly where it was at the end of last October. His rating shot up when we captured Saddam and has slowly returned to where it was beforehand. The WaPo also observes that

The survey found that, for the first time since the war ended, fewer than half of Americans -- 48 percent -- believe the war was worth fighting, down 8 points from last month. Fifty percent said the war was not worth it.

To put that number in perspective, you again have to go to the supplementary data. It turns out that 58% of American think that the war in Iraq contributed to the United States' long-term security. In addition, 57% believe that the war can be justified even if we don't find any WMD Iraq. In contrast, 24% think that finding the weapons is critical to justifying the war while 17% think the war simply wasn't justified. On a related note, 61% of Americans still believe Iraq had WMD, a 28-point drop since December. All in all, it seems hard to agree with the WaPo's conclusion that

Questions about Bush's use of prewar intelligence, in addition to feeding doubts about his honesty, have sent his performance rating plummeting.

Given that Bush's overall approval rating has dropped 8% while his approval rating for handling the economy has dropped 7%, it seems a lot more sensible to conclude, as a great American statesman once said, "It's the economy, stupid."

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