Air guitar

Zogby International released a new poll yesterday. Why, pray tell, does this poll deserve space on Extra Sauce, Please? Because it's a poll taken of the troops in Iraq.

http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1075

Of all the findings this poll reports, I find this one the most telling: "Almost 90% think war is retaliation for Saddam’s role in 9/11." NINETY PERCENT! Almost ALL of our troops think Saddam had something to do with 9/11! That's an incredibly high number of brainwashed soldiers, wouldn't you say? If almost our entire fighting force is unaware that Saddam HAD NO ROLE in 9/11 and/or NO CONNECTIONS TO AL-QAIDA, then one could say, factually and unequivocally, that our army is fighting for a falsehood.

This is news to me because I could accept the notion that soldiers in the Army, Navy, Marines, whatever, simply accepted that their orders stood as a matter of the chain of command and that it simply wasn't their place to question our commander in chief. That, at least to the best of my knowledge, is how the military works. It's how it has to work.

But if almost all of them think this, it has to be because of the military's propaganda machine and the bullshit that the Bushies have been piling on about Iraq since 2001. Does the military not allow their troops access to the Internet? To news sources? To CNN? To the New York Times? Even a limited amount of exposure to such mainstream sources would have dispelled such a notion as "Saddam planned 9/11" a long, long time ago.

I wonder what would happen if someone just started handing out copies of Chomsky's work to the grunts.