Zogby Poll

2 March, 2006. 432 words.

This isn’t really cultural, but Mrs. Krehbiel wanted to make sure I didn’t miss Zogby’s survey of U.S. troops: A Letter From The Troops.

I’m no fan of using statistics for political purposes (I always think of Colbert whenever I write “I’m no fan of…”). I think I’ve said before that polls and statistics can usually be manipulated to support just about any viewpoint imaginable. With that in mind, I started to read Zogby’s article yesterday, but quickly gave up on it when it became obvious he wasn’t presenting unbiased results. (Also it was pretty dry reading.) In my mind, he was clearly using this polling data to support an anti-Bush position. In particular, I found this opening sentence pretty silly:

The findings are surprising, particularly the fact that an overwhelming majority of 72 percent of American troops in Iraq think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year.

There’s nothing “surprising” about soldiers wanting to come home, especially when they’re halfway across the world and routinely shot at or blown up on a daily basis. (I’d say anyone that didn’t want to leave would fall under the “psychotic” category.) I think it would have been a lot more informative to see how that 72 percent figure breaks down by service and rank (one would imagine that lower ranked soldiers would be more likely to prefer a sooner exit), but that information wasn’t in Zogby’s article, and I’m not paying the $20 fee to look for it in the full results.

On the other hand, Mrs. Krehbiel pointed out something that was surprising about the poll: A lot of soldiers don’t know why they’re in Iraq. Come to think of it, a lot of civilians don’t really know either-I’d be hard pressed to come up with an easy answer for that one myself. But it was odd to see that 85 percent thought they were retaliating “for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks” and 77 percent thought they were stopping “Saddam from protecting Al Qaeda in Iraq.” But again, it’s hard to make much of that without breaking it down by service and rank. And it doesn’t really matter anyway, because of that whole “ours is not to reason why” thing. Maybe it’s better if they don’t know.

On a related note, I saw on Andrew Sullivan that Mystery Pollster broke down the validity of the statistics behind the Zogby poll: The Zogby Poll of Troops in Iraq. He doesn’t give a conclusion one way or the other, but mine would be “take this data with a grain of salt.”

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