harboring terrorists associated with Al-Qaeda or had ties with Al-Qaeda, and some
members of the administration, including the former National Security Council Advisor
and current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, have stated that they consider the Iraq
war to be one front in the war against terrorism that was set in motion by the events of
9/11.
Recently, Althaus and Largio (2004) have cast doubt on this explanation, showing
that the widespread misperception was largely an artifact of the switch to forced-choice
questions: in polls that simply asked the open-ended question of who was responsible for
the attacks, very few respondents mentioned Saddam Hussein; but when forced to choose
a culprit from a list of possible names, majorities mentioned Saddam Hussein.
This is particularly striking in a Harris poll taken soon after the 9/11 attacks: “In
an open-ended question which asked ‘If Congress were to declare war, who do you think
it should declare war against or aren’t you sure?’ 61% said they were not sure, 25%
named either Afghanistan, the Taliban, or Osama bin Laden, and only 6% mentioned Iraq
or Saddam Hussein. Yet when presented with a forced-choice question later in the same
poll, fully 78% said that it was very or somewhat likely that ‘Saddam Hussein is
personally involved in Tuesday’s terrorist attacks.’” (Althaus and Largio, 2004: 798).
The open-ended question yielded a 6% response that Iraq or Saddam Hussein should be
the object of war, while the forced-choice question found 78% agreeing in Saddam
Hussein’s culpability, in the same poll.
Moreover, Althaus and Largio note that while early polls that asked this question
were largely open-ended, around the first anniversary of September 11 pollsters began to
switch to forced choice questions. This led to the impression that the mistaken link
between Saddam and 9/11 was on the rise, and therefore to the popular impression that it
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