That Zogby Poll of the Troops in Iraq
National Review’s John Derbyshire uses it as a springboard to justify his curmudgeonry, though it’s a hopelessly flawed poll.
It was comissioned by an anti-war group, and conducted by the pollster who insisted the 2004 election was John Kerry’s to lose. Zogby also insisted that Kerry would win 311 electoral votes (he actually got 252 and did not win the election). Right up until the closing of the polls, Zogby continued to insist that Kerry would win. Was that based on any actual poll result or just wishful thinking?
The questions Zogby used in the poll were leading and therefore guaranteed to skew the result. It’s also worth noting that John Zogby and his brother James Zogby have long-standing associations with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a group that has known connections to Islamism. It would be painting with a very broad brush to assume that CAIR’s connections to terrorists are Zobgy’s, but it wouldn’t be out of bounds to wonder whether being one step removed from association with Hamas might color Zogby’s opinions of the war and therefore his work on public opinion polling.
I don’t find him or his polls trustworthy at all.
But on a more basic level, what on earth was the Pentagon thinking when it allowed this poll to be conducted, especially given who paid for it and who conducted it? It should have been obvious from the outset that this poll was going to become yet another anti-war talking point. The anti-war movement’s holy grail is to turn the troops against the war they’re fighting and use that to kill off the war’s remaining public support; a poll that purports to prove that the troops are against the war gets the anti-war movement very far toward that goal.
SecDef Rumsfeld recently noted that we’re fighting an information war against the terrorists, and we’re losing it. No wonder. If the Pentagon continues making boneheaded decisions like the one that put untrustworthy James Zogby and his anti-war patrons in charge of gathering up the troops’ opinions on the war, we have no hope of winning it.
(thanks to Chris)