Who Knew?

Now it is difficult to know with any certainty which respondents were ignorant of some of the things asked of them in this latest poll, but one figure stood out for me.  The percentage of Americans who know that “more civilians than troops have died in Iraq” was 69%, which obviously means that this most glaring and obvious fact of the Iraq war is unknown to nearly one-third of the public.  As it happens, roughly one-third of the public still supports the war.  Is it the same one-third?  I don’t know, but it might help explain why there is a singular lack of moral indignation about the slaughter unleashed by this war among war supporters if so many people literally don’t know that a slaughter is going on. 

Add to that the even more appalling figure that only 55% of Americans knew that American killed in the war were approximately 3,000 in number (it is now over 3,300 since the invasion), and it begins to make sense why some people are so unimpressed by the outraged opposition to the war.  If huge numbers of Americans don’t know how many soldiers have died, but believe for some reason that more soldiers than civilians have died in Iraq, it isn’t hard to imagine how those people could convince themselves to stick with Mr. Bush through thick and thin–after all, it’s not that bad right now, so why wouldn’t they? 

Update: It doesn’t exact inspire me with confidence that a full 7% of the public believes that Mikhail Gorbachev is still in power.  Have these people been living in a cave?  Oddly enough, more people knew Gorbachev was in charge of the USSR when he actually was in charge than now know that Putin is the President of Russia.  Fewer Americans (68%) know that we have a trade deficit today than in 1989 (81%), yet our trade deficit today is worse than it was then.  One would think that the imbalance of trade, along with other ills of the free-trading regime, would be something that more people know about than they used to, but that isn’t the case.