Americans believe quite a few strange things - but perhaps the most disturbing belief which has remained persistent over recent months is the idea that Iraq played an important role in aiding Al Qaida and Osama bin Laden. Such a connection is not impossible, but it is unlikely - and so far, there is no evidence of it. So why do people believe?

The Houston Chronicle reports:

A new poll shows that 57 percent of Americans continue to believe that Saddam Hussein gave "substantial support" to al-Qaida terrorists before the war with Iraq, despite a lack of evidence of that relationship. Also, 45 percent of Americans have the impression that "clear evidence" was found that Iraq worked closely with Osama bin Laden's network, and a majority believe that before the war Iraq either had weapons of mass destruction (38 percent) or a major program for developing them (22 percent).

[M]any Americans continue to believe that the threat from Iraqi weapons and its alleged links to terrorism justified the war. That conviction correlates closely with support for the war and President Bush, the poll released Thursday found. For example, among those who say most experts agree that Iraq had banned weapons, 72 percent plan to vote for Bush. In the poll, roughly 4 in 10 Americans perceived the administration as saying it had clear evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction just before the war.

Why would so many people believe something like this when it is clear that there is no evidence to support such a belief? Juan Cole comments:

I would suggest that the two-party system in the US has produced a two-party epistemology. Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know. If it were accepted that Saddam had virtually nothing to do with al-Qaeda, that he had no weapons of mass destruction (nor any significant programs for producing them), and that no evidence for such things has been uncovered after the US and its allies have had a year to comb through Baath documents-- if all that is accepted, then President Bush's credibility would suffer. For his partisans, it is absolutely crucial that the president retain his credibility. Therefore, rather than face reality, they re-jigger it to create a fantasy world in which Saddam and Usamah are buddies (as in the Jimmy Fallon/ Horatio Sanz skits on the American comedy show, Saturday Night Live), and in which David Kay (of whom respondents say they've never heard) never recanted his earlier belief that the WMD was there somewhere.

It is bad for the country for policy to be made based on falsehoods, and it is even worse for failed policies not be recognized as such because the public clings to myths.

I don't know if the above suggestion is correct (and neither does Cole, he simply offers it as a possibility), but whatever the reason for such widespread failure to correctly perceive reality Cole is correct that basic policy on falsehoods is tragic. It would not be entirely unreasonable for people to suspect that Iraq may have had connections to Al Qaeda, but even that is a rather tenuous position given the evidence that we have.

Read More:

• War on Terrorism
• Religion in Iraq