From: Adam Watt (adamwatt@mac.com)
Date: Mon Jun 07 2004 - 16:33:41 BST
'63% of iraqis say good'
Well, I had the misfortune of spending several years employed by
several market research companies, including Gallup, and ICM (the
Guardians political pollsters). As a result, I believe I have a good
working knowledge of the industry. Let me tell you this, Market
Research is nonsense. Without exception. The stats are so easily
manipulated, it's just ridiculous. When they say 'random sample' take
that with a bag of salt. Add to this that the people carrying out the
research are poorly treated, and as a result have little or no regard
for the manner in which this is done, the fact that the vast majority
of people will give surprisingly varied responses to the same questions
on differing occasions, and that the tone of voice used is often enough
to invoke a particular response (certain answers = shorter surveys
('routing') = less work)).. and you have, to quote "lies, damn lies..
and statistics".
In the case of Iraq, if you consider the situation the above gets even
worse. The culture of the Middle East is notorious for suspicion, and
in Iraq with its history of secret police, and the current situation
whereby if any official is entering your property to question you (ie:
Troops), that's a serious cause for concern. 2 years ago, such
questioning could have resulted in your death (seemingly even that
hasn't totally changed) .. those memories aren't erased quickly, and
looking at the events Abu-Ghraib, the fear is still relevant. So, when
they say 98% complied with the interview, it's hardly surprising. If
you were hypothetically sitting at home in Iraq, let's say, your cousin
disappeared at the hands of Saddam, there were troops all around, maybe
someone you know was brutally interrogated by them.. then someone
knocks on the door and wants to ask a few questions.. first you'd
agree. Then you'd tell them what you think they want to hear. As if
your life depended on it. (then you'd probably worry about the
consequences, which makes me question the morality of this PR
endeavor.. but I digress). The stats you use below are an indicator of
nothing, except, that is, the will of whoever funded it to garner
supposed 'facts' about the mindset of Iraqs populace. Gallup didn't pay
that's for sure, and the FAQ you linked fails to mention it too..
Garbage, basically.
Market Research aside, the situation in Iraq will be explained in time.
Will the Iraqis be handed sovereignty? Questionable I think, but we'll
see. Is Iraq even governable without a harsh regime? Highly
questionable, but we'll see. Will life improve for Iraqis, overall, and
in the long-term? Maybe, I hope so, but it's not certain. In Iraq,
nothing is...
Personally, what concerns me is not so much that Iraq was invaded, but
that it was done outside of the UN framework, and as such sets a
dangerous precedent. The UN is far from perfect, but it's still the
closest thing (albeit, not very) to global democracy. The same
democracy we are imposing on Iraq. For us anyway, it's not a perfect
system, but the best we have.. I'm sure we can all agree on that. So if
Saddam (and he was) was a dictator who imposed his will without the
consent of the people, what is the US doing on an International scale?
The same thing it seems to me. This is what disturbs me most, and I'd
be interested to hear your views on this, David and others. Ever heard
of the 'Project for a New American Century'? Google it for more info,
they are having it all their way.. Scary.. I would rather live in a
word governed by a democratic body of nations, than by PFNAC's
'American Leadership'..
Best wishes to all,
Adam
On Monday, June 7, 2004, at 01:57 pm, David Robjant wrote:
> MarkSH,
>
> Judging by the good grace of your last regarding tinnitus, your
> innumerable
> weekend posts on Chomsky and war ought to be worth looking into a
> little.
> But hold on a minute, how many are you posting!???
>
> In one of your posts you challenged my to provide documentation for my
> claim
> that despite mixed feelings the majority of Iraqis are pleased with the
> US/UK intervention to remove saddam. Let's deal with that - I can't
> respond
> to your every appear for documentation because often it's a matter of
> simple
> historical record where I can't understand your denial of the facts
> (eg your
> imagining that the French etc didn't think Saddam was a threat) - but
> on
> this matter of opinion polls I can help. I was talking about the
> Gallup
> Poll of Iraq, which is carried out several times in the year and is
> widely
> reported in the press UK and US. Here is one of many available links
> garnerd via Google under "Gallup Poll of Iraq":
>
> http://media.gallup.com/GPTB/goverPubli/20040429_9.gif
>
> Datemark 29 April 04. The question asked of selected Iraqis is "Let's
> talk
> about Iraq, say five years from now. Do you think Iraq will be much
> better
> off, somewhat better off, somewhat worse off, or much worse off than
> it was
> before the US-British led invasion?"
>
> Only 19% say either the same or worse off, while 29% say much better,
> 34%
> somewhat better.
>
> So in sum: 63% think that the invasion will do good, 19% think that it
> will
> either do no good or do harm, and that leaves 18% not expressing a
> view.
>
> For info on how this poll was carried out:
> http://www.gallup.com/help/FAQs/answer.asp?ID=169
>
>
> And now on a few further related matters from MSH:
>
> MSH:
>> It will take me a while to respond to the rest of your long post, but
>> I will. However, I think our primary source of contention comes down
>> to a difference in our beliefs in the motives for US military
>> interventions around the world. You seem to believe that such
>> activity derives from good intentions, in that they are really about
>> trying to make the world a better place for the majority of the
>> world's population; I believe, and I think evidence shows, that this
>> is not true. Furthermore, you seem to believe that the US has some
>> moral obligation to act in this fashion; I think that this "moral
>> obligation" is invented to conceal baser motives.
>
> No. That is not a summation of the disagreement. In my previous
> post, I
> said:
>
> "I did not alledge 'for any intervention x, if x is carried out by the
> US
> then it is humanitarian' - no I specifically addressed Iraq,
> mentioning, by
> the by, that I condemned Kissenger's war crimes in Chile etc.
> Secondly, in
> specifically addressing Iraq, I did not claim that the entirety of the
> reasons for war were Humanitarian. I beleive the war to have been
> fully
> warranted on UK national security grounds alone..."
>
> It's you and Chomsky who perpetrate the dangerous generalisations here,
> asserting generalised beleifs about:
>
>> the motives for US military
>> interventions around the world.
>
> - as if one beleif about motivations will automatically do for all
> cases. I
> have no such beleifs. I look at each intervention *case by case*.
> Hence, I
> am able to distinguish Iraq from Chile etc.
>
> I am very much encouraged, about your ability to drop this nonsense
> about a
> *general* diagnosis applying in advance to all cases, by your quote
> from
> Chomsky:
>
>> "I'm sorry that you don't see the difference between Nazism
>> and the US-UK system. It's very real. Luckily for India,
>> it was never conquered by the Nazis. The British were bad
>> enough, but the Nazis were incomparably worse. And not
>> just a matter of gas chambers. Putting them aside, what
>> about the plans to exterminate 10s of millions of Slavs so
>> as to create Lebensraum for the master race -- just for
>> starters? I'd really suggest that you rethink all of this. All evils
>> are not identical."
>
> I'm chuffed about this, particularly because members of my own extended
> family over several generations were engaged in the 'Raj', and I would
> not
> have been pleased to have them thought of as Nazis.
>
> (Digression re Raj: Over two hundred years or so of the Raj I can
> think of
> some terrible episodes (a notable famine in Bengal - due to
> incompetence,
> the mutiny - due to religious insenitivity about animal fat, the
> amritsar
> massacre - due to crass stupidity) - but these years were by no means a
> litany of unremitting oppression: the British ruled India by a large
> degree
> of consent for much of that period. So, when Chomsky says that the
> British
> were 'bad enough', perhaps you will be gracious enough to cite his
> specifics. Was it the railways, the law, the education system, the
> plumbing, the doctors, the schiolarship or the trade that Chomsky most
> objects to? And in what period? The raj of the 1760's (when the
> British
> married into and intergrated with Indian society) is not the raj of the
> 1860's (when the British mostly imported their womenfolk from Surrey)
> is not
> the raj of the 1920's. Bear in mind that whatever the (Disraeli)
> rhetoric
> of empire, British involvement in India began as a mutual trading
> arrangement between the previous encumbent empirialists, namely the
> islamic
> Mohguls (the East India Company was awarded the contract for tax
> collection
> in Bengal), proceeded largely by taking up the social and
> administrative
> roles opened to them by the Moghuls, and that it ended by political
> means.
> (In one period the British fought against Russian encrouches towards
> India
> in Persia and Afganistan - what would a Mohgul empire replaced by the
> Tsar
> have been like?) Much of the credit for the eventually peaceful
> transfer
> of soverignty goes to one london educated lawyer, ie Mahatma Gandhi
> (who as
> soon as he had ousted the British had to deal with murderous religous
> extremism), but I do not think it would be churlish to point out that,
> just
> as it takes two armies for a war, it takes two well intentioned
> lawyers to
> contract. India is now the largest sustained democracy on the face of
> the
> planet, united by english law and the english language. To whose
> efforts is
> this a continuing testament? Not just those of 'anti-imperialists' I
> say,
> but also those of bridge builders, railway engineers, scholars,
> teachers,
> lawyers etc. The interest and awareness of westerners in Indian
> religions
> owes alot to to this un-ideological variety of imperialism, and many of
> those who studied and translated sanskrit texts into english did so as
> part
> of an official role within the Raj. Without the Raj, no Northrop
> Frye, no
> Robert Pirsig.)
>
> A lacuna (or atleast a curiousity) in Chomskys position is, that if one
> realises that the word 'imperialism' covers a wide variety of hugely
> unequal
> evils, and indeed some positive goods, why then is it treated as a
> checkmate
> move in any argument about American foreign policy?
>
> The Romans. What have they ever done for us?
>
> (Forgive these allusions)
>
>
>
>
> In another post you responded to my *trucking* analogy, which went
> thusly:
>
> "Civillian casualities, however many there were, were not then the
> target or
> objective of the US military... The Republican guard, however, was
> routinely deployed under saddam's regime with the *objective* of
> murdering
> large numbers of Iraqi civillians. I feel this difference is material.
>
> It is the difference between a) someone who drives a truck so as to
> get some
> load to his destination knowing full well that trucks kill thousands
> of
> pedestrians every year, and b) someone who drives his truck
> specifically
> *at* the pedestrian.
>
> One might imagine the further possibilities where c) the truck driver
> drives
> directly at the pedestrian and calls out as he goes 'you other truck
> drivers
> are really all murders to, so this is nothing special', and d) the
> truck
> driver refuses to mount the cab on the grounds that trucking is murder.
>
> I think that in effect the position on war outlined by some on this
> list
> collapses the distinction between (a) and (b) in order to end up with
> (d).
> What they forget is that in so doing they also justify (c), gladdening
> the
> hearts of terrorist truckdrivers everywhere."
>
> You responded:
>
>> msh says:
>> You're [trucking] analogy is fine. But it springs from the false
>> premise that
>> trucking is the only way to get the load to its destination. See
>> Chomsky's alternate means of transportation, quoted above.
>
> And (the gist from several pages of) Chomsky's alternative means of
> transporting a Saddam-free Iraq into reality is:
>
>> "The choice was never restricted to war or murderous sanctions that
>> destroy the society and strengthen the dictator. Another possibility
>> was allowing the society to reconstitute so Iraqis could determine
>> their own fate....
>
> Er, which means what? Which means a game of fantasy revolution:
>
>> "Some, like
>> Ceausescu, were easily comparable to Saddam Hussein as tyrants and
>> torturers. All were overthrown, from within. There's every reason to
>> believe that SH would have gone the same way if the US hadn't
>> insisted on devastating the civilian society
>
> Those reasons being? Does Chomsky perhaps mean the way Saddam
> arranged for
> the opposition to become dead, thus further facilitating their work
> from
> underground? By the by, if this analysis of Ceausecu (carefully
> forgetting
> the bit about the dependence upon USSR policy and Russian troops, and
> the
> east block dominos falling due to Gorbachev) really holds water as a
> policy
> recomendation, it would appear to invalidate the D-Day landings.
>
>> "At the time of the 1991 uprising there were many things that could
>> have been done, had there been any interest in allowing Iraqis to run
>> their own affairs. It would have been possible, for example, not to
>> authorize Saddam to use military aircraft to crush the uprising. Or
>> not to deny rebels access to captured Iraqi military equipment.
>
> Ah - now we go beyond mere fantasy towards the Chomsky Plan for the
> liberation of Iraq, or the Chomsky hindsight Plan for the liberation of
> Iraq, given that at the time he was hardly arguing for more action
> against
> saddam. What does the plan consist of again?
>
>> It would have been possible, for example, not to
>> authorize Saddam to use military aircraft to crush the uprising.
>
> Whadayamean "not to authorize"? You mean we should shoot his planes
> down
> (like, er, in the no-fly zones over Basra and the Kurds that we
> instituted
> for this very purpose?). Hm, so some limited military action against
> Saddam
> is OK - but why limit it? Why not support the rebels properly, on the
> ground? Oh no - that would be imperialism.
>
>> Or
>> not to deny rebels access to captured Iraqi military equipment.
>
> You mean we should ship the iraqi arms captured from Kuwait into Basra?
> That's sweet. Don't interfere in Iraqi affairs, no, just send them
> guns and
> let them fight it out themselves. What do you think, a couple of
> million
> untrained shias with borrowed weaponry, versus one highly trained army
> of
> sunnis - they could drag it out for years. The Iran-Iraq war Mark II.
> Great plan Chomsky and co. Sort of Humanitarian, you know, in it's
> way.
> That way being: avoiding anything that smacks of US "imperialsim" even
> at
> the cost of millions of iraqi lives.
>
> Look, if we were going to intervene in Iraq in '91, and we should have
> - as
> it now appears even Chomsky admits - we should have done it
> *properly*.
> Now we have.
>
> I say: Good.
> 63% of Iraqis say: Good.
> Chomsky says: Imperialism.
>
>> Please!
>
> I couldn't have said it better Mark.
>
> DavidR
>
>
>
>
>
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