Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

Did Saddam Hussein's government have weapons of mass destruction in 2003?
Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people to justify the war in Iraq.

People tend to become ''independent of reality'' in these circumstances, says opinion analyst Steven Kull.

The reality is that after a 16-month, $900-million-plus investigation, the U.S. weapons hunters known as the Iraq Survey Group declared that Iraq had dismantled its chemical, biological and nuclear-arms programs in 1991 under U.N. oversight. That finding in 2004 reaffirmed the work of U.N. inspectors who in 2002-03 found no trace of banned arsenals in Iraq.

Despite this, a Harris Poll released July 21 found that a full 50 percent of U.S. respondents -- up from 36 percent last year -- said they believe Iraq did have the forbidden arms when U.S. troops invaded in March 2003, an attack whose stated purpose was elimination of WMD.

''I'm flabbergasted,'' said Michael Massing, a media critic whose writings dissected the largely unquestioning U.S. news reporting on the Bush administration's shaky WMD claims in 2002-03.

''This finding just has to cause despair among those of us who hope for an informed public able to draw reasonable conclusions based on evidence,'' Massing said.

Timing may explain some of the poll result. Two weeks before the survey, two Republican lawmakers, Pennsylvania's Sen. Rick Santorum and Michigan's Rep. Peter Hoekstra, released an intelligence report in Washington saying 500 chemical munitions had been collected in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.

''I think the Harris Poll was measuring people's surprise at hearing this after being told for so long there were no WMD in the country,'' said Hoekstra spokesman Jamal Ware.

But the Pentagon and outside experts stressed that these abandoned shells were 15 years old or more, their chemical contents were degraded, and they were unusable as artillery ordnance. Since the 1990s, such ''orphan'' munitions have turned up on old battlefields and elsewhere in Iraq, ex-inspectors say. In other words, this was no surprise.

''These are not stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction,'' said Scott Ritter, the ex-Marine who was a U.N. inspector in the 1990s. ``They weren't deliberately withheld from inspectors by the Iraqis.''