You’ll be hard-pressed to find it in Daniel Davies’ account, but the case of Katharine Gun, a former British intelligence officer who has become something of the “Valerie Plame” of the anti-war movement on the other side of the pond, seems rather open-and-shut.

Gun, an admitted opponent of the war in Iraq, is charged with violating the Official Secrets Act by leaking a memo, apparently from the NSA, soliciting help from their British counterparts at GCHQ in conducting intelligence operations against several U.N. delegations—something which, to the best of my knowledge, is not illegal in either the United States or Britain. But, you know, she’s being made a “scapegoat” (i.e. being charged with a crime she’s almost certainly guilty of) because of the “embarrassment” to the government (i.e. she broke the fricking law).

Anyway, if you’re inclined to venerate criminal acts, you’ll probably enjoy this Bob Herbert op-ed which plays the martyr card to the hilt. If not, well… scroll down, there’s better stuff here to read.

Update: Jacob Levy also has an interesting take on Mr. Davies’ clarion call.

Since Ron Suskind’s alleged tell-all book has come out, Paul O’Neill, the ex-treasury secretary whose revelations the book is based on, has taken to the talk-show circuit in an attempt to disavow many of the more sensational quotes from the book.

• James Joyner is among those noting O’Neill’s pointed non-endorsement of the Democratic opposition.
• O’Neill is dragging out the “Ron Suskind’s name is on the cover” defense for the allegations that he leaked Treasury Department documents.
• John Cole notes that many of O’Neill’s revelations aren’t that revelatory, while Matt Stinson compares doves’ jumping on the O’Neill story with hawks’ leaping onto Iraqi WMD revelations as they appear.

Then again, maybe O’Neill’s just preemptively defending himself from the hit squad Kevin Drum thinks has been sent after him by Karl Rove.

Glenn Reynolds has the scoop on David Letterman’s latest trip into a war zone. In a related story, I hear Jay Leno took a crew down to Camp Pendleton to film a “Jay Walking” segment.

(Yes, it’s the same joke I used last year when Dave went to Afghanistan…)

The Commissar has a masterful political analysis of The Return of the King. Laugh-out-loud line:

Did enjoy Robert Fisk’s review, “After movie let out, I fell in with a bunch of Orcs, and they beat me up. And I don’t blame them; I would have beaten myself up, too.”

Da.

Michael Totten has compiled a round-up of a number of doctored Saddam Hussein photos for your amusement.

Amazing how all the news seems to happen while we’re down. (The appropriate parties have been executed for their roles in our period of downtime, in case you were wondering.)

To review:

• I got rid of about half the beer in the house at a grad student party on Friday night. Less crap to move. Yipee! (Thanks to Brooke and Lindsey for organizing the gathering.)
• I turned 28-going-on-60 on Sunday.
• Someone actually wants to cite part of my dissertation in a book. I’m stunned.
• Steven Taylor had the latest Toast-O-Meter update, with Howard Dean widening his lead over the pack despite increased attacks from the trailing candidates.
• The presumptive Democratic nominee made a speech on foreign policy that somehow failed to mention North Korea.
• Everyone’s favorite Dixiecrat apparently didn’t mind dipping his pen in different-colored ink, so to speak.
• Signifying Nothing went down to ignominious defeat in the Wizbang 2003 Weblog Awards balloting. I blame the butterfly ballot and the use of a first-past-the-post system.
• And, last but not least, coalition forces arrested a biker dude near Tikrit and gave him a lovely shave and a fight to Qatar at taxpayers’ expense.

This is today’s entry in the Beltway Traffic Jam, in case you were wondering about such things.

On Saturday, Eugene Volokh noted a poll conducted by Fox News/Opinion Dynamics that showed that 78% of respondents believe the media would have leaked news of President Bush’s Thanksgiving visit to Baghdad—a belief that is essentially identical among Republicans and Democrats, though perhaps even more strongly held by Independents.

As someone whose research interest is in public opinion, I have to wonder how this opinion came about, and it’d be a fascinating case study. It’s a shame Fox doesn’t contribute polling data to ICPSR like the New York Times, Washington Post, CBS and ABC do…

Both James Joyner and Dean Esmay note Deeds’ account of Hillary Clinton’s unpopularity with the troops in Baghdad (as noted here at Signifying Nothing on Saturday morning); James and Dean find Hillary’s snubbing justifiable, both due to her (and her husband’s) record in supporting the military and her party’s position on the conflict, while Howard Owens and Glenn Reynolds think she deserved better treatment from the troops, as she has been a relatively consistent supporter of the war in Iraq.

However, I think it’s instructive to look to what Deeds wrote:

Given Hillary’s constant trashing of the Administration’s policies and the work being done in Iraq, her advance people get a flunking grade on setting up a lunch to be with the “troops” and other Americans in the CPA mess hall. That was not the right thing for Hillary do to.

While Sen. Clinton may have supported the war, let’s take a look at what press accounts said about her visit to Baghdad. From Sunday’s Boston Globe:

Clinton and Reed arrived in Iraq on Friday, a day after President Bush made a surprise trip to Baghdad. Clinton, who represents New York, and Reed, of Rhode Island, spent Friday with military brass and troops, occupation officials, and aid workers.

They said Friday that the costs of rebuilding Iraq should be spread among more nations.

“I’m a big believer that we ought to internationalize this, but it will take a big change in our administration’s thinking,” Clinton said. “I don’t see that it’s forthcoming.”

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

Clinton and Reed said the expense and political burden in administering Iraq would be made easier with the U.N.’s stamp of legitimacy and help in transferring power to Iraqis.

From the BBC:

Both the senators said the governance of Iraq would be made easier with greater UN involvement.

In other words, the senator was in Iraq, criticizing the performance—and competence—of the Coalition Provisional Authority, and saying the UN would do a better job. No wonder her visit was as popular among CPA staffers as Deeds indicates.

One Fine Jay, in his trackback below, has some interesting thoughts on the larger meaning of Sen. Clinton’s visit for the Democrats. I still stand by my original belief that her visits to Afghanistan and Iraq are good things; however, I think she shouldn’t be surprised to get a cold shoulder from people working for the CPA after criticizing their competence from afar. That being said, she probably deserved a little better response than that documented at Deeds. Then again, senatorial visits have rarely met with great appreciation from the military; when former senator Jim Sasser, then the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, visited RAF Fairford in Britain once, I don’t recall anyone being particularly excited he was there. (If it sounds like I’m equivocating, it’s because I am; I really don’t know what to make of the Clinton visit at this point.)

John Galt of Deeds ran into another VIP in Baghdad on Friday. Let’s just say that her visit didn’t quite go over as well as the president’s.

As many in the blogosphere have noted, George Bush visited Baghdad today, while Hillary Clinton was in Afghanistan. Both visits were admirable—our troops deserve the recognition—but let me focus on Bush’s visit to Iraq, and the political implications of it.

The “obvious” political implication is that it’s an example of using the office to look presidential, something none of the Democratic presidential candidates can accomplish. But there’s a second political implication: Bush is now committed. He’s gone to Baghdad, and said (paraphrasing) “we’re not going anywhere until the job is done.” It’s free ammunition for Democratic candidates who do want to stick it out with American troops in Iraq—admittedly, not all of the field—if Bush decides to cut and run. This makes it that much harder for the administration to give up in Iraq—which, to those of us who think Bush should stay the course and follow through on our commitment to a democratic Iraq, is a good thing.

Dean Esmay has the text of the President’s remarks in Baghdad. In related news, John Cole is keeping an eye on the reaction from the less sane quarters of the left.

I’ve already said my piece on this blogospheric navel-gazing exercise in the comments at Dan’s place (in short, I think all the participants are talking past each other); however, Matt Stinson, Robert Garcia Tagorda, James Joyner, and Anticipatory Retaliation have the cream of the reactions—from my POV, at least.

Robert Prather also responds, noting that Salam Pax in particular owes his livelihood to the U.S. forces who liberated Iraq.

Dan Drezner has been blogging up a storm (also here) on the Center for Public Integrity study and the Iraq reconstruction contracts issue. I’ve added what little I can in his comments, so just go forth and read the posts.

One of the sound-bites being paraded around is on whether particular Democratic candidates are “credible” on national security. The latest iteration of this theme was expressed by Joe Biden, who said:

[T]he candidates have to “demonstrate that they have a foreign policy, a security policy, that is coherent and is grown up, that we can handle the bad things out there in the world.”

But what is credibility? In this voter’s mind, it’s not strictly speaking about Iraq: by my standard, you could be credible but have opposed the war in Iraq. To me, I think credibility boils down to whether or not the candidate believes that other countries get to veto the use of American military power to achieve an objective that is in the national interest. Ultimately, this question—not the war question—is where many of the Democratic candidates lose their credibility with me.

This is not, mind you, a call for blanket unilateralism. When other countries share our objectives, and are willing to cooperate with us in achieving those objectives, we can and should work with them to do so. But when other countries clearly have different objectives than those of the United States—as was the case in the Iraq war, where a number of middle-power states wanted to pursue commercial ties with the Saddam regime and were plainly unwilling to commit their own resources to containing that regime’s ambitions for rearmament and obtaining non-conventional weapons—an American president would be deeply unwise to allow them to decide whether and how American military force should be used.

John Cole adds his outrage to Matt Stinson’s regarding the Senate’s idiotic decision to require the Iraqis to pay back half of the $20 billion reconstruction aid package. Frankly, the idea is complete lunacy, for reasons both John and Matt ably articulate.

One of the things that critics who accuse America of being an imperial power should consider—repeatedly—is that the United States has not engaged in a war for territorial acquisition since 1898, and has given, or at least offered, independence to every territory captured since the Mexican-American War. The states of Western Europe and Japan were restored to sovereignty, and left free to their own devices, even when those aims contradicted ours; to name just two examples, Japan was left free to erect high barriers to imports from America, while France was allowed to pursue an independent foreign policy that often is at odds with that of the United States. Imperial powers don’t tolerate these sorts of things, as the Hungarians and Czechs could testify about their Russian overseers or Tibetans (and, increasingly, the people of Hong Kong and Macau) could point out about their masters in Beijing.

Another data point, from Glenn Reynolds: Reuters reports that Iraq’s civilian authorities want a GSM-based mobile phone system; GSM technology is generally produced by European manufacturers, while the rival CDMA system has strong backing from American companies. It will be Iraq’s first public mobile phone network, as the Saddam Hussein regime did not permit use of mobile phones by members of the public.

Of course, Reuters never misses a chance to accentuate the negative:

A functioning national phone system, which Iraq has lacked since Saddam Hussein was toppled in April, could also allow guerrillas fighting the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq to organize themselves better on a national level. The U.S. Army says guerrilla groups are only locally organized at present.

For good measure, it also notes:

The choice of Kuwaiti companies to help run the phone network is a controversial one in a country where many Iraqis still resent their small southern neighbor after years of tension following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

No Iraqis, of course, are quoted as finding this decision “controversial.”

Reuters spends much of the report going off on complete tangents that have nothing to do with mobile phones, discussing such disparate topics as unemployment, Vladimir Putin, and a U.N. draft resolution on Iraqi reconstruction.

RCR News has a report with additional details (which, somehow, manages to stay on-topic).

Why am I getting a weird feeling of dejà vu from reading the New York Times’ alleged sneak preview of Tuesday’s UN speech by George Bush?

According to the officials involved in drafting the speech, for an audience they know will range from the skeptical to the angry, Mr. Bush will acknowledge no mistakes in planning for postwar security and reconstruction in Iraq. ... In the speech, Mr. Bush will repeat his call for nations — including those that opposed the Iraq action — to contribute to rebuilding the country, but he will offer no concessions to French demands that the major authority for running the country be turned over immediately to Iraqis.

Wow. Maybe he’ll also storm out of the room in anger and call people in the audience names.

Steven Taylor of PoliBlog notes a Wall Street Journal editorial on Iraq’s al-Qaeda ties and the capture of Abu Abbas on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Meanwhile, my friend Scott Huffmon forwards a collection of quotes from administration officials that juxtapose 9/11 with Iraq (Scott therefore wins the longstanding Signifying Nothing “no-prize” for forwarding evidence of the adminstration linking Saddam and 9/11). Perhaps more interesting is the associated article discussing how the public’s belief in a 9/11-Saddam connection came about. Key graf:

A number of public-opinion experts agreed that the public automatically blamed Iraq, just as they would have blamed Libya if a similar attack had occurred in the 1980s. There is good evidence for this: On Sept. 13, 2001, a Time/CNN poll found that 78 percent suspected Hussein’s involvement—even though the administration had not made a connection. The belief remained consistent even as evidence to the contrary emerged.

Or, as I am fond of saying, when it comes to politics, it’s all heuristics.

I know virtually nobody reads my blog, but you saw this AP reporting here six weeks ago. However, something odd struck me in the article:

President Bush and members of his administration suggested a link between the two [Saddam and 9/11] in the months before the war in Iraq. Claims of possible links have never been proven, however.

Bush et al. have suggested a direct link between the Hussein regime and al-Qaeda, most famously during Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations earlier in the year. To my knowledge, they have never suggested a direct link between Hussein and the 9/11 attacks (and I’ll gladly link to any credible source that contradicts this statement). Both myths—the mass public’s belief that “Saddam was involved in 9/11” and the leftists’ “Bush said Saddam was involved in 9/11“—seem to persist despite any evidence to support them. The former is explainable as voters using heuristics to fill in the gaps in their knowledge; the latter mostly seems to be a partisan screen connected to the “lefties are smarter than Bush” belief system.

What’s amazing is that the former belief is widely rejected by political and media elites, but the latter seems to have gained widespread acceptance, to the point the allegation can appear routinely in AP articles without supporting evidence. Yet exactly the same body of evidence underpins both beliefs, and it supports neither conclusion.

This week’s Newsweek has a fairly convincing explanation for why Saddam gravely miscalculated before the war:

U.S. DEFENSE AND Security sources tell NEWSWEEK that high-ranking former Saddam aides have told U.S. interrogators that Saddam believed the only assault President George W. Bush would ever launch against Iraq was the kind of low-risk bombing campaign that the Clinton administration used in the former Yugoslavia.

Or, for that matter, the kind of low-risk bombing campaign that the Clinton administration used repeatedly against Iraq during the 1990s. Or the same kind of campaign that was waged against al-Qaeda (and unfortunate Sudanese businessmen). Why was he so confident?

Saddam was also confident that France and Germany would pressure the Americans to retreat from this course, leaving Iraq shaken but Saddam still in power.

Which, of course, nicely dovetails with Daniel Henninger’s Friday column discussing the Democrats’ foreign policy credibility shortcomings:

Democrats have been urging “cooperation” and “consultation” for 40 years. Maybe in this election we’ll finally find out what this means. Democrats strongly imply that the mere process of talking with the U.N. or even with an enemy such as North Korea constitutes success. The cardinal Democratic sin in foreign policy is to “alienate our friends.”

In his announcement address, Sen. Kerry said: “I voted to threaten the use of force to make Saddam Hussein comply with the resolutions of the United Nations. I believe that was right—but it was wrong to rush to war without building a true international coalition.” What does this mean? Faced with a real threat to American security, will John Kerry wait, talk and consult, no matter how many months or years it takes until Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder and Kofi Annan are standing with him on the bridge?

I don’t doubt that a President Kerry or even a President Dean would deploy the U.S. military on relatively modest missions—a Haiti or Liberia, or Somalia. But an Iraq war? A strike and follow-through against North Korea? After Vietnam and no matter that September 11 happened, and no matter what the merits, Mr. Kerry and the others (perhaps excepting Sen. Lieberman), give the impression they would not act, or not act in time. They would consult, specifically with France, Russia, Germany and the U.N. secretary general.

There is no way to know with certainty whether any of them would act on the scale of the Iraq war on behalf of American security. But Mr. Kerry has usefully raised the issue. It won’t be sufficient to say they would have “done things differently.” The real question is whether they would do it at all.

No matter how much discussion Washington is willing to engage in with “allies” and “partners,” the fundamental fact remains that Osama bin Laden, Kim Jong-Il and Saddam Hussein are perceived to be less of a threat by most other countries than they are by the United States. Subordinating U.S. security interests to those of less threatened states (or at least countries that think they are less threatened; France and Germany are probably more at risk from attacks by Islamic fundamentalist terror groups than the United States is) is not a sound foreign policy—as the behavior of Saddam Hussein, emboldened by nearly a decade of the U.S. engaging in that sort of foreign policy, clearly demonstrates. In other words, a Saddam that took U.S. threats seriously might actually have been containable.

OpinionJournal link via Econopundit.

Venomous Kate links to the claim of responsibility for the bombing of the U.N. compound in Baghdad. Whodunnit? Al-Qaeda. Why, you ask?

“So why the United Nations? Number one, the United Nations (is against Islam), it is a branch of the American State Department and it wears the robes of an international organization.

“The double standard policies of the United Nations are against Arabs and Muslims. This issue does not need to be proved. It is clear like the light of the sun at midday,” the statement said.

The statement called U.N. envoy to Iraq, Brazilian Sergio Vieira de Mello, “America’s number one man.”

Do they not get CNN (or even al-Jazeera) in al-Qaeda-land? Anyone with the slightest clue in the universe would reject this statement as being completely devoid of sense (common or otherwise).

Today’s game of compare and contrast for Signifying Nothing readers: compare this post at CalPundit with this post at Pejmanesque, which arrive at completely opposite conclusions based on the same day’s reports of administration actions vis à vis Iraq’s WMD programs.

Perceptual screens—they’re catching on!

Matthew at A Fearful Symmetry (via Michael J. Totten, where a good discussion continues in comments) notes the attempted war crimes prosecution being brought before the International Criminal Court (not to be confused with the International Court of Justice or the International House of Pancakes) by a group of Greek lawyers over the war in Iraq. The target? Not Saddam Hussein or any of his henchmen (you know, real war criminals). Instead, it’s Tony Blair.

As Michael writes:

Say what you will about the Iraq war. Say it wasn’t worth it if you must. Gripe about proceduralism if that’s what you care about most.

But liberating an enslaved people from a genocidal monster is not a crime against humanity. It put an end to crimes against humanity.

Placing bleeding-heart liberals like Tony Blair in the same moral category as Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot won’t garner a whit of sympathy from the United States for any court that might take such arguments seriously.

Meanwhile, Matthew is concerned that the court is just another forum for lefty whinging against Global Capitalism:

I don’t like the ICC for reasons like the scenario played out in the story above; as it stands now, too many leftists view international courts as just another protest venue. While some of them break storefront windows in Montreal, and others clash with police officers in Genoa, still others make themselves heard by issuing asinine charges of “crimes against humanity” against persons whose primary crime is disagreeing with the left-wing worldview. For them, the ICC is less a criminal court and more an International Illiberal Activities Committee, which begs the question, who are the McCarthyites now?

Now, the ICC statute (for all its faults) does have safeguards against gratuitous prosecutions, including allowing the U.N. Security Council a virtual veto over any prosecution by the ICC. And, as Kevin Drum points out in Michael’s comments, “If the fact that idiots can file lawsuits were enough to discredit a court, we’d be reduced to settling cases in the United States by peering at goat entrails.” (Of course, the fact idiots can file lawsuits has been one of the major arguments for “loser pays” and other tort reform proposals in the U.S.)

But, the safeguards have limits. If the ICC accepted a frivolous prosecution against a signatory state, and a U.N. Security Council member decided to veto a prosecution against one of its own citizens (for example, if Britain vetoed the Blair prosecution, or charges were brought against Jacques Chirac over France’s intervention in Cameroon and France decided to veto), people would legitimately be concerned about a “cover up.” So the bias of the court, and the Security Council, will be to pursue even the most frivolous prosecutions against Security Council members, so the court will retain the appearance of neutrality.

Perhaps the ICC will deny this particular prosecution on the grounds than U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 authorized member states to take decisive action against Iraq. But if it does so, it risks undermining its credibility with its core constituency—the internationalist activists, like those who brought this prosecution, who genuinely believe that International Law (as decided solely by them; democracy be damned) can and will be made to justly govern nations.

One of the more bizarre questions revolving around the Iraq war is that there is a large proportion of the American public who believe that Saddam Hussein was involved personally in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and the foiled attack on the White House.* This belief persists despite there being no evidence of a direct link, no statements by any credible source that there is a direct link, and repeated refutations of a direct link. (Many leftists want to pin this belief on the Bush administration, but I don’t think the charge sticks without showing that Bush et al. deliberately fostered this belief; there’s simply no evidence of that.)

Being a good empirical social scientist, I was curious about who would believe this assertion. Again, I used the second March 2003 CBS/New York Times poll (conducted March 5-7, 2003). The poll doesn’t have much useful data for testing any psychological theories, but a sociological model seemed to work fairly well. I produced both maximum-likelihood (ML) and MCMC estimates; since the ML estimates were basically identical to the MCMC estimates (the missing data problem was less acute in this model), for ease of interpretation I stuck with them. Here are the probit results (I’m too lazy to build a proper table from the R output; sue me):

            Estimate Std. Error z value Pr(>|z|)
(Intercept) -0.01797    0.26186  -0.069 0.945277
pid         -0.09596    0.04594  -2.089 0.036699 *
college     -0.27348    0.14702  -1.860 0.062858 .
male        -0.62078    0.14587  -4.256 2.08e-05 ***
black        0.17079    0.17603   0.970 0.331934
catholic     0.05115    0.11446   0.447 0.654921
jewish      -1.18340    0.49424  -2.394 0.016649 *
atheist     -0.41736    0.14938  -2.794 0.005208 **
haskids     -0.04056    0.10507  -0.386 0.699462
agecat       0.01696    0.05475   0.310 0.756710
libcon       0.25993    0.07314   3.554 0.000379 ***
pid:college -0.10990    0.05790  -1.898 0.057699 .
pid:male     0.12066    0.05629   2.144 0.032059 *
---
Signif. codes:  0 `***' 0.001 `**' 0.01 `*' 0.05 `.' 0.1 ` ' 1
N: 782
Percent correctly classified: 64.83%
Proportional reduction in Error: 27.25%
McKelvey/Zavonia Pseudo-R^2: 0.214

Jewish and atheist voters are significantly less likely than Protestant voters (the omitted reference category) to believe Saddam was personally involved in 9/11, while there is no difference between Catholics and Protestants. Conservatives are significantly more likely to believe in the Saddam-9/11 link than liberals.

The other significant effects are expressed in interactions between multiple variables. I estimated interactions between gender (male) and party identification (pid) and between level of education (college) and party identification. These effects are shown in this graph. The horizontal axis is the respondent’s party identification, where 0 is “strong Republican”, 1 is “independent leaning Republican”, 2 is “true independent”, 3 is “independent leaning Democratic”, and 4 is “strong Democrat.” (Age is set to the mean value; other variables are set to the modal category.)

Males in general, particularly male Republicans, are much less likely than females to believe the Saddam-9/11 link, regardless of education level. However, among Democrats, the primary difference is between the college educated and the less-well educated, with the gender difference being relatively small.

What does this mean? There are a few possibilities. The most compelling one is that people who don’t know are guessing, drawing on some vague association between Saddam Hussein and radical Islam. The demographic variables may be indicators of attentiveness to the media; those who pay more attention to the media may have a more nuanced understanding of Middle Eastern politics. The partisan effects suggest that some voters may be projecting their own belief systems onto the question; strong Republicans may be projecting hawkish attitudes onto questions about Saddam, while strong Democrats may be projecting a belief that Saddam isn’t a threat onto him, at least among the better-educated.

More generally, the results suggest that trying to argue Saddam wasn’t linked to terrorism may be a losing strategy among their own base for Democratic presidential candidates that opposed the war or are having second thoughts now. Strongly Democratic voters without a college education are more likely than not to believe that Saddam was involved in 9/11, and it will be difficult to reeducate them on this point. These findings suggest that however candidates like Bob Graham and Howard Dean try to spin things, many Democratic voters think Saddam Hussein was a legitimate target in the war on terror, and they will cross these voters at their own peril.

Then again, maybe all these people think Saddam was involved in 9/11 because his regime actually was, at least to some degree.

Sorry, I meant to write up the results from the Saddam-9/11 analysis last night so I could post them here today. In the meantime, though, you can look at the pretty graphs. Not sure if they’ll make much sense without the writeup though…

As promised, I went off and played with the data on whether or not voters believed that Iraq's WMD threat justified war. Since it had the most questions on the issue, I used ICPSR Study #3755, better known as the second March 2003 CBS/New York Times telephone poll (1010 total respondents; conducted March 5-7). As I anticipated, no questions directly dealt with whether or not Iraq had been obtaining bits and pieces for nuclear weapons, or even mentioned the word "nuclear" at all; the popular phrase at the time was "Weapons of Mass Destruction," a term left undefined by any of the questions.

I'm extremely reluctant to present results for two main reasons. The first is that there was a huge amount of missing data; many respondents failed to answer a number of the questions, so there is less information available (I worked around this problem by using a Bayesian data augmentation model rather than a typical maximum-likelihood approach). The second reason is that I believe the question wording of most of the items on the survey make a recursive model somewhat inappropriate; many of the questions appear to tap the same underlying dimension, which is basically whether or not the respondent trusts the administration, and the causality is not at all clear. Nevertheless, there are a few interesting findings. So here goes:

(Coefficients are probit coefficients, as the dependent variable is dichotomous. All variables are yes/no "dummy" variables unless otherwise described.)

A few words for those who aren't accustomed to regression results. The left-hand column is the variable that is believed to have an independent effect on the dependent variable (in this case, support for the U.S. going to war in Iraq). The next column shows the magnitude of the mean effect of that variable. The final columns show the "credible interval" (similar to the "confidence interval" in frequentist interpretations), which basically says that there is a 95% chance that the true coefficient lies within that range of values. If the credible interval doesn't include zero (i.e. both values are positive or both are negative), we can say that at least 19 out of 20 times, the effect in the population at large would be in the direction of the sign (i.e. positive or negative).

What does this model tell us? Generally speaking, people who believed the U.S. had presented sufficient evidence of Iraq's WMD programs, trusted Bush to handle the Iraq issue, and believed Iraq's weapons to the a threat to the U.S. were more likely to support a conflict than those who didn't. (This finding was also robust across all of the various scenarios for war proposed in the survey; the dependent variable here posited no particular configuration of events.) A couple of other effects approach significance: belief that the administration was fully forthcoming, that the UN inspections were ineffective, and the respondent's age (older voters being less likely to support a war).

More interesting is what it doesn't tell us. The effects of education and gender are insignificant; men were no more likely to support the war than women, and more educated people are no less likely than less educated people. Perhaps most interesting, and possibly problematic for anti-war Democrats, especially if the "Bush lied" theme fails to stick, is that there was no independent effect of partisanship; this suggests that "Bush Democrats" (we might call them "WOT Democrats" if we wanted to be cute like Larry Sabato) were just as enthusiastic for war as "Bush Republicans." And, the people who believe Saddam was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks were no more likely to support war than those who didn't.

In my next post, I will present a more interesting model from the same dataset, looking at the question on Saddam and 9/11.