Memo from the reality-based community, feel free to discard

Remember that Zogby International poll of U.S. troops in Iraq reported on last week that revealed 72 percent of respondents wanted U.S. forces out within a year?

This week's issue of Time magazine revealed another tidbit from that poll that, for some inconceivable reason, did not make for lead material in the immediate reporting: 85 percent of U.S. troops surveyed said the main mission in Iraq was retaliation for Saddam Hussein's role in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Eighty-five! That's more than the percentage of the civilian public that believed that at the legendary height of the Fox News drumbeat of misleading post-invasion coverage. At last count, in a poll conducted by Harris Interactive in December 2005, only 22 percent of the U.S. adults surveyed reported believing Saddam had any role in the attacks, and 24 percent reported believing several of the hijackers were from Iraq.

Now, anyone who has dabbled at all in political science or journalism will tell you that the political and current events ignorance of the general American public has been shown to be consistently, depressingly, perhaps-authoritarianism-isn't-such-a-bad-idea profound, but this makes ours look like a model democratic citizenry.

This is just disturbing–as if we needed any more support for the notion that the leaders of the new American "empire" really do invent whatever reality suits their ends and mobilizes their means.