A majority of Republicans and over forty percent of Americans still hold the belief that American forces uncovered Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, according to a new poll released Wednesday.
Conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s research center, PublicMind, the survey also questioned people on a number of popular conspiracy theories and found that the American public’s beliefs regarding factual events is “strongly connected” to partisanship and media choices.
Overall, of the 964 adults who were sampled in the national phone survey, 42 percent said that it was “definitely” or “probably” true that American forces found an active weapons of mass destruction program in Iraq. This belief—which has been repeatedly refuted and was one of the primary justifications for the Iraq invasion—is still held by the majority of Republicans (51 percent) and roughly a third of Democrats (32 percent).
The survey was conducted at the end of 2014.
“People who think we did the right thing in invading Iraq seem to be revising their memories to retroactively justify the invasion,” said Dan Cassino, a professor of political science and the director of experimental research for the poll. “This sort of motivated reasoning is pretty common: when people want to believe something, they’ll twist the facts to fit it.”
When matched with respondents’ primary news sources, the survey found that 52 percent of Fox News viewers believed the U.S. found WMDs in Iraq, compared with 41 percent of CNN viewers, 31 percent Daily Show viewers, and 14 percent who get most of their news from MSNBC.
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