Following up on Bill Edmundson’s post on the recent Zogby poll of U.S. troops in Iraq, I found one detail to be particularly telling.  Fully 85% of troops polled said that the U.S. mission was to "retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attack".There seem to be some misconceptions here. 

Writing on Steve Sailer’s web site,  Greg Cochran gives the following insight on what might be driving these beliefs:

I think this is pretty easy to understand: the alternative [to the Saddam/9-11 link] for the average Joe is to conclude that we invaded for no reason that he can understand at all: i.e. that the government is insane. So, many people make up a reason. Because the alternative is too disturbing – more so if they think of the government as being run by _ their side_.. I had figured that the fraction  of our armed forces in Iraq that believed that we were retaliating (for things that Iraq never did) would be higher than at home, because a volunteer army  would self-select for such beliefs, and because the idea that friends would have been crippled or killed for no reason that anyone could understand would  be hateful.  I had guessed about two-thirds of the Army would believe this, but it’s higher than that.

That observation lines up very well with my own beliefs about human nature.  There has been a curious unreality in the public debate about the war.  I think it is driven by just this type of cognitive dissonance.  People can’t quite seem to handle the truth.  Especially in the case of soldiers serving in Iraq, I don’t really blame them.