2003-03-12 9:59 a.m.
abre los ojos

from the Independent (London):

The divergence is also plain in public opinion. In Britain, only 19 per cent of the public would back British participation in an attack on Iraq without a new UN resolution. In the US, however, 55 per cent would support an American invasion even in defiance of a vote at the Security Council, a New York Times/CBS News poll found.

*sounds of crickets chirping, accompanying dead silence*

WHO are these 55 percent? Last time I checked, we had at least a million people protesting a month ago. Apparently, they weren't well-represented in this past week's poll.

And for the who's-at-home, polls are, and have always been, a numbers game. Both the ABC and the CBS/Times polls used a sampling of 1,000 people (hardly an adequate sample, as there's no documentation of where the sampling is pulled from. They could be from Republican Party rolls, specific areas of the country, etc. From my time at Fox, I've seen people spin the results, even if they're against what the article's trying to prove, to sound right (e.g. "45 percent of honest, hard-working America approves of war without a U.N. resolution, while 55 percent does not").

As with everything, it's a problem of perception. The world doesn't want a war right now, especially with the economic downslide we're in the middle of. Like it or not, the U.S. is one of the cornerstones of the global economy, and if our esteemed leader continues to ignore domestic issues in favor of avenging the failed assassination (gotta love the use of 'ass' in this sentence) of his daddy and securing oil rights for the U.S. in a puppet government that we'll install, but have no intention of actually monitoring...we'll be reduced to the second-rate imperialist joke that the Republicans have always wanted us to be. No humanitarian causes unless they serve our interest, all Americans' money dumped into the private sector, letting people fend for themselves, etc.

The cutest part of all of this is that Tony Blair is buckling under enormous political pressure in his country. Pity our 'minority' of several million protestors didn't budge Bush's resolve to go to war. The Brits see Bush as a bigger threat than Saddam.

This 'majority' is a sampling of a thousand people. They could interview everyone at the law firm I work at in the Financial District (somewhere between 1,500-2,000) and get a better sampling. Or maybe not...most of them read the Post and think it's objective news. (Of course, if the surveyors branched out and got the ACLU in there � which resides 13 floors below me � that poll would paint a whole new picture of the American landscape.)

As always, keep your eyes open.