Special Report
By Grant F. Smith
The Chicago Council on Global Affairs conducts a survey every two years, and its insights are eagerly awaited by journalists and the public alike. On Sept. 14 the Council released its latest results, based on responses from 2,108 American adults. In one key finding, the Council reported, “a majority of Americans is prepared to use U.S. troops to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon (69 percent).” However, the Council survey did nothing to examine why Americans fear Iran or whether fears about its nuclear program were well-founded, although it did speculate about lingering fallout from the 1979 hostage crisis. The Council also concluded that “Americans tend to support maintaining or increasing military aid to Israel, Taiwan and Mexico. In a pattern similar to preferences for economic aid, the public tends to favor decreasing or stopping military aid to Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq.”
However, even though the Council acknowledged that most Americans vastly overestimate U.S. foreign aid levels, it failed to ask warranted “control” questions or provide any relevant data to respondents.
Research into the science of polling reveals that respondents usually will not admit to ignorance. They will offer an opinion if the questions asked seem important—and they will respond if they feel they should know the answer. Such “baseless opinions” render a great deal of expensive data-gathering useless, and enable fraudulent polling. Are conclusions about American fears of Iran and support for unknown allocations of foreign aid trumpeted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs the result of “baseless opinions?”
To find out, IRmep conducted its own public opinion poll using Google Consumer Surveys, canvassing just over 2,100 adults shortly after the Chicago Council report was issued. Google is able to draw a representative sample by using known Internet user demographic data to select visitors to such partner websites as YouTube, Pandora, the New York Daily News, The Christian Science Monitor, Reader’s Digest, The Lima [Ohio] News and The Texas Tribune (among many others) for short surveys. The estimated sampling error for IRmep’s survey was only 2.2 percent.
The first IRmep question was phrased: “The U.S. gives Israel over $3 billion annually (9 percent of the foreign aid budget and more than any other country). The amount is:” Respondents could then select from five options: “much too much,” “too much,” “about right,” “too little,” and “much too little.” To reduce selection bias, the order of response choices was randomly reversed. According to 60.7 percent of Americans polled, the U.S. was giving Israel excessive foreign aid. More than a third, 33.9 percent (the majority response), said Israel received “much too much” U.S. foreign aid, while 26.8 percent felt it was “too much.” This result directly contradicts the Chicago Council on Global Affairs findings based on questions that provided no dollar amounts or shares of U.S. foreign aid.
According to the IRmep survey, those under the age of 35 tended to be more in favor of reducing aid to Israel. However an overall majority across age categories scored current aid as “too much.”
When cross-tabulated by income, only those Americans earning $150,000 or more per year stated such aid was “about right” (47.6 percent), although within that income category, 42.9 percent thought aid was “too much,” while only 9.5 percent scored it as “too little.”
Since aid to Israel is premised on defense—allegedly keeping Israel from being “pushed into the sea” by surrounding hostile states—how can the majority of Americans believe the U.S. provides too much aid? American presidents and politicians are heavily invested in Israel’s “ambiguity” policy of never discussing its arsenal of nuclear weapons. However, most Americans (63.9 percent, according to the IRmep survey) openly state they believe Israel possesses an arsenal of nuclear weapons. It is plausible that Americans believe the huge flows of aid purportedly maintaining Israel’s “qualitative military edge” are unnecessary since it has already long possessed the ultimate deterrent.
Why do Americans fear Iran almost two generations after the hostage crisis? Do they hold unfounded fears, buttressed by sustained propaganda campaigns? According to Gallup, 93 percent of Americans believed Iraq had facilities to create weapons of mass destruction before the 2003 U.S. invasion. This figure declined to only 86 percent after the invasion, when such claims finally were debunked. At the same time, 7 in 10 Americans also believed Saddam Hussain had a personal role in the 9/11 attacks. None of it was true, of course—although government officials, Israel lobby groups and media pundits endlessly insinuated the opposite. Today, according to the IRmep poll, most Americans (58.5 percent) believe Iran already possesses nuclear weapons. This belief—although entirely erroneous—is nevertheless understandable, given that the same groups that lobbied for war on Iraq have now refocused their efforts on targeting Iran.
The Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that 64 percent of Americans preferred not to take sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict and that 55 percent would oppose sending U.S. troops to protect Israel if it attacked Iran. The Council’s simpler, more straightforward questions on those subjects appear to have yielded bona fide responses. But asking Americans about their support for U.S. yearly aid to Mexico ($206 million) and Israel ($3.1 billion, plus many congressional add-ons and secret intelligence support) as if it were at all comparable is not useful. Similarly, rather than ignore the recent lessons about how disinformation produced unwarranted support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Council should have probed for any unfounded basis at the root of American fears about Iran. It is more important than ever to uncover the public’s true feelings, particularly when polls are used to justify expending massive quantities of blood and treasure, or used by politicians falsely claiming that all Americans have an “unbreakable” commitment to Israel.
Grant F. Smith is director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, Inc. (IRmep) in Washington, DC. The IRmep survey report, “American Public Opinion on U.S. Aid to Israel,” with detailed results and methodology may be downloaded at <www.IRmep.org/09302014_USFATI.pdf>.