Must Ignore Data

Kevin Drum points to the polling data you'll find above taken from Shibley Telhami's report on Arab public opinion. Basically, few Arabs think that us leaving would cause some wider spiral of chaos. Kevin says "Obviously the Arab public could be wrong about this, but this strikes me as a mostly pragmatic question, not the kind of thing driven either by dislike of the U.S. or weird conspiracy mongering." I'm not sure I totally agree with that assessment. I assume that most Arabs take a dim view of U.S. motives in Iraq in maintaining a military presence there for so long and, consequently, their instincts are to believe the rosiest possible scenarios about withdrawal. Conversely, the people in the United States who do want a permanent military presence in Iraq in order to try to dominate the region are also the same people most likely to believe the bleakest possible scenarios about a quick withdrawal.

I'd say the main significance of this finding is that it's yet another piece of information about Arab public opinion that it's vital we ignore and bury, making sure it never enters the elite conversation about American foreign policy. It's vitally, utterly important that all assertions about America's role in the Middle East be guided by a combination of ideology-driven presupposition and the whispers of dictators from the Gulf and Jordan. Just as we ignored the fact that few Arabs believed an invasion of Iraq would bring democracy to their region before the war, so too must we ignore the fact that few Arabs view our continued prosecution of the war as vital to their stability. We even manage to ignore the ways in which our Israel policy drives anti-American sentiment.

With that track record, surely we can ignore this, too, and go back to talking about how all hostility to the United States is driven by hatred of freedom and none of it by dislike of American foreign policy priorities. Yes we can!

Comments

But if you polled Charlie Gibson and Gen Petraeus, you'd get 100% disaster. I think upton sinclare had something to say about that.

Anyway, i think it'd be interesting, in sick way, to poll "The Village" about their thoughts on the matter.

Posted by Client #11 | April 17, 2008 12:34 PM

What would Lebanon know about the effect of a foreign occupation on the internal stability of a country anyway?

Posted by Christopher Colaninno | April 17, 2008 12:38 PM

it would be more interesting to see what iraqis opinion might be.

tingling (not quite interesting) are the outliers: lebanon & jordan (on the high side of work it out) vs. UAE and Morocco.

Posted by mike c | April 17, 2008 12:39 PM

Oh, and i'd be chagrined if i didn't point out that if you consider the tenacity with which the us media ignores iraqi deaths, even when it does cover the war, I'd only be hypocritical for the media to change their "brown people don't count" rule in this instance.

Posted by Client #11 | April 17, 2008 12:40 PM

Well, polling data like this provides marginal information on the spread of chaos, for a couple reasons:
1) Given the non-democratic nature of many of the surrounding countries, it's not necessarily public opinion that drives the actions of neighbouring countries
2) I bet if someone had asked current Iraqi insurgents a few years back what they pictured themself doing in 2008, I suspect many of them would not have predicted that they'd be causing chaos in Iraq. Or, in other words, once shit starts happening, and emotion or anger or whatnot kicks in, people start doing crazy shit in response.

Posted by mitch | April 17, 2008 12:46 PM

For what it's worth, I suspect this is largely an artifact of the Arab world's near-unanimous (and richly earned) wish to see Western (Colonial) Powers in general get the fuck out and stay the fuck out of Arab lands. In other words, I don't think this necessarily reflects any deep, penetrating, esoteric, culturally-bred-in-the-bones knowledge about conditions on the ground in sectarian Iraq. Obviously, we can freely speculate otherwise, as well--in other words, this doesn't really mean much of anything knowable.

Posted by elle loco | April 17, 2008 12:56 PM

I think it's important to spread around the results of this poll, because it provides a more realistic picture of the situation than the Republicans (and their media) do alone. However, I think it's important not to take it to mean too much. The optimistic poll respondents- although they were in the majority- may be wrong. If you're right, you're not any less right because the rest of the world thinks differently. If we put you in a time machine back to 2,000 years ago, the world wouldn't somehow automatically become flat jut because everyone you met there would believe it's flat.

If we liberals do things like say "Oh yeah, this poll it says that Arabs in other Middle Eastern countries say that Iraq wouldn't turn into a mess, so they muct know better than the neocons, so it's proven now it wouldn't turn into a mess"- or words to that effect- it really does make us look like a bunch of naive idiots and it really does help the Republicans keep their people in their fold. What's more, the Republicans probably won't even openly raise the objection with you, since they like to hold their cards so close, and you won't get a chance to make the argument in more detail- the Republicans will just take your argument down in front of their subordinates and goons later on, when you're not there.

So it's really important to spread this data, but it's equally important not to say anything dumb, and to use data the right way. If you graduated from college, you probably took statistics, so remember everything you've heard about what stats mean and what they don't.

Some thoughts on last night's debate and coverage

Posted by Swan | April 17, 2008 1:01 PM

This sort of polling is completely illegitimate and useless, except on the occasion when they can be used to back some hawkish goal, at which time they will become the most noble indication of the human spirit EVAR.

Posted by El Cid | April 17, 2008 1:08 PM

we ignore the fact that few Arabs view our continued prosecution of the war as vital to their stability.

Very few do, except the ones whose opinions we care about: the rulers of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, etc.

This poll demonstrates what you say it does, namely that the average Arab wants the US to get the hell out of the middle east. That's not going to happen, so who cares?

Posted by right | April 17, 2008 1:28 PM

I don't think these attitudes mean very much as Iraq isn't exactly a country that, say, Moroccans would go visit.

This looks more to me like the Fox News effect--where some extraordinary number of Hannity viewers were under the impression the US found WMDs in Iraq--except with Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera is the most widely-viewed news org in the middle east; Al Jazeera's narrative is that the US is the only cause of any of Iraq's schisms; that attitude becomes conventional wisdom among al Jazeera's viewership, true or not.

Posted by Shinyk | April 17, 2008 2:08 PM

Interesting data. The Lebanese may be right, having had practical experience.

The Devil's Advocate might note that a poll of this same demographic doesn't think Arab men perpetrated 9/11.

Posted by cmholm | April 17, 2008 2:09 PM

The outliers are interesting. Syria was not polled, that means the Jordanians are the people in the poll most likely to suffer if chaos did break out in Iraq. After all they are the ones swamped by refugees they want to get rid of.

And, of course, the Lebanese are the ones with the most experience with a chaotic civil war.

It also looks like the UAE and Morocco were oversampled. Are their populations really so much larger than Jordan and Lebanon (plus the small upward pull of Saudi Arabia and Egypt)?

Posted by Lon | April 17, 2008 2:17 PM

It's really patronizing and condescending to assume that the results of the polls don't reflect actual Arab beliefs and instead a mere anti-colonialist belief.

Given that a good chunk of the Arab population believes that the current chaos in Iraq is in fact a US goal in order to justify permanent occupation, these results are hardly surprising.

btw Shinyk, have you ever watched Al-Jazeera to claim that they show the US as the "only" cause of Iraq's problems?

Posted by skyler | April 17, 2008 2:46 PM

Does the fact that percentage of locals who believe that immediate American withdrawal would result in civil war has fallen substantially over the last two years give anyone pause?

Posted by TW Andrews | April 17, 2008 3:01 PM

btw Shinyk, have you ever watched Al-Jazeera to claim that they show the US as the "only" cause of Iraq's problems?

No, but I've been reading english.aljazeera.net since the first day of its launch. The underlying narrative on al jazeera is exactly that--as surely as the underlying narrative of the O'Reilly Factor is something like "liberals are assaulting traditional culture." O'Reilly cherry-picks and spins stories to fit that narrative (sometimes in a torturous fashion)--so does al Jazeera with stories and editorials printed on its website. I can't imagine the editorial content differs greatly on Arab language television from its online component.

I will say, however, that al Jazeera has been branching out into other types of reporting and is doing a decent job (mostly human interest stories about famines in parts of Asia, etc.), though that's only been in the last year or so.

Posted by Shinyk | April 17, 2008 3:04 PM

It's interesting that the 15% of Arabs who think there would be dire consequences is too few to warrant serious engagement, but 15% of Americans without healthcare merits a complete overhaul of the system.

Posted by mike | April 17, 2008 3:15 PM

Matt, you need better trolls. This "Mike" guy isn't even trying.

Posted by Persia | April 17, 2008 3:23 PM

Matt, you need better trolls. This "Mike" guy isn't even trying.

Posted by Persia | April 17, 2008 3:30 PM

Al-Jazeera is rather crappy, but there was a study IIRC that found that al-Jazeera was actually harsher in its portrayal of Iraqi insurgents than major American media outlets, such as the New York Times, which wasn't exactly raising the flag of insurgency.

I would like to know what's up with Morocco and UAE in that poll. It would be interesting to see if the likes of Qatar and Algeria would agree. Overlooking Syria is also faintly bizarre. Looking at the Palestinians would also have been interesting. Although they aren't Arabs, looking at Iranians and Turks as well would be interesting.

Posted by Reality Man | April 17, 2008 3:36 PM

Reality Man,
but there was a study IIRC that found that al-Jazeera was actually harsher in its portrayal of Iraqi insurgents than major American media outlets, such as the New York Times, which wasn't exactly raising the flag of insurgency.

I've never seen that study, but al Jazeera certainly didn't much like AQI's hotel attack in Jordan. Went on about it long after the NYT sped on to Giuliani answering his cellphone during a speech and continued to Edwards's $400 haircut (or whatever irrelevent things happened to be going on at the time).

The bias in al Jazeera doesn't usually lead to a lack of acknowledging violence committed by insurgents (bombings are not hushed up). More often, al Jazeera will, towards the end of an article, insert six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon logic to try and tie violence committed by Iraqi insurgent groups (and sometimes the groups themselves) to the US, even when the connection is highly suspect and the specific insurgent group and the US are directly at odds. Saw a great deal of this after the Samarra bombing.

I agree that the opinions of Egyptians or Moroccans as to the repercussions of an Iraqi withdrawal are far less interesting (and probably far less indicative) than the opinions of Syrians, Iranians and Turks.

Posted by Shinyk | April 17, 2008 6:50 PM

Basically, few Arabs think that us leaving would cause some wider spiral of chaos. Kevin says "Obviously the Arab public could be wrong about this, but this strikes me as a mostly pragmatic question, not the kind of thing driven either by dislike of the U.S. or weird conspiracy mongering." I'm not sure I totally agree with that assessment.

Considering that the highest percentages which think the US can leave without problem are found in countries which (1) are not necessarily anti-American and (2) are the best-positioned to judge the matter, I'd agree with Kevin on this.

Posted by Hans B | April 17, 2008 8:32 PM