MB Civic

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/19/1433244

On the ISG report and Iran

75% of the population here, including a majority of Republicans, think that the United States ought to keep to diplomatic peaceful measures in engagement with Iran, which they approve of, and not use military threats — exact opposite of the policy.

The same attitudes are true of the people of the region. They don’t like Iran, and they don’t certainly [want a] nuclear-armed Iran, but a majority of the population of the regional states favors a nuclear-armed Iran to any form of military intervention, just as people here do. Well, that’s kind of irrelevant, so that’s also not mentioned in the [ISG] report.

Towards the end he says this…

In fact, the attitude of the public here [in the US] towards the political system is very dramatic. I mean, about a third of the population in the United States, according to recent polls, believes that the Bush administration was responsible for 9/11. But they don’t think it’s a problem, like they don’t think that’s anything to worry about it. Yeah, of course, they’re all crooks and gangsters and murderers, tell us something new, you know. It doesn’t have much to do with us. That’s a shocking commentary on the state of American democracy.

There’s a lot of talk here about, you know, we have a divided country. We have to unify. We need a unifier, somebody who will bring it back together. Red and blue, and so on. That’s pretty marginal. It is a divided country. It’s divided between public opinion and public policy. A very sharp divide. And on issue after issue, the whole political system is well to the right of the public and public attitudes. And we know a lot about these, because it’s a very well studied topic in the United States.

Kind of puts it all in perspective doesn’t it?
-MAB