When Osama Became Saddam: Origins andConsequences of the Change in America’s Public Enemy #1

Scott L. Althaus, University of Illinois, Urbana-ChampaignDevon M. Largio, Vanderbilt University

In the days following the 9/11 terroristattacks, Osama bin Laden quickly be-

came America’s leading enemy. But asthe Bush administration prepared itscase for war against Iraq in the firsthalf of 2002, officials began to avoidmentioning Osama bin Laden’s name inpublic. At the same time, administrationofficials increasingly linked SaddamHussein with the threat of terrorism inan effort to build public support forwar. By the first anniversary of the 9/11attacks it appeared that this public rela-tions effort had produced results beyondall expectations: several polls releasedaround the time of the anniversary re-vealed that majorities of Americans be-lieved Saddam Hussein was personallyresponsible for 9/11.

This was a completely unsubstanti-ated belief, and not even the Bush ad-ministration was willing to suggest sucha direct connection. But it was a power-ful rationale for going to war amongthose who held it. According to Galluppolls conducted on the eve of war inmid-March of 2003, between a quarterand a third of those believing Hussein

was responsible for the 9/11 attackscited this belief as the main reason whythey would support invading Iraq.

How did the American public cometo hold this misperception about Saddam Hussein? The popular viewsuggests that it was a byproduct of theinformation campaign waged by theBush administration in making its casefor war. However, we show that thispopular view is wrong. By charting thechanging levels of public attentiongiven to Osama bin Laden and SaddamHussein in American news coverageand in President Bush’s public state-ments, our analysis provides a clearperspective on the timing and impactof the administration’s communicationefforts. By also systematically examin-ing the full range of survey findingsthat appear to reveal widespread mis-perceptions about the link between Iraqand the 9/11 attacks, we show thatmistaken beliefs about Saddam Hussein’s culpability were less a prod-uct of the Bush administration’s publicrelations campaign than of the 9/11 attacks themselves. Moreover, the ap-parently high levels of public misper-ception are in part an artifact of thewording and format of poll questionsput to the American public.

When Osama became Saddam

To identify trends in news coveragegiven to Osama bin Laden and SaddamHussein, we used the Nexis/Lexis newsdatabase to identify stories mentioningthese names as well as stories mention-ing the phrase “War on Terror” or“War on Terrorism.” We confine ourpresent analysis to stories distributedby the Associated Press wire service,but a parallel analysis of New YorkTimes coverage finds essentially thesame patterns.1 During the period fromJuly 2001 to August 2003, a total of17,531 Associated Press stories used

the phrase “War on Terrorism” or “Waron Terror”; 29,979 mentioned Osamabin Laden; and 31,907 mentioned Saddam Hussein.2 Figure 1 shows thechanging frequency with which theseterms appeared in Associated Press reports over time.

Osama bin Laden had been men-tioned in nearly 300 stories during thetwo months prior to 9/11 before be-coming the focus of public attention inSeptember and especially October of2001. But news attention to bin Ladenbegan to wane in November, and asbin Laden’s trail grew cold after thefall of the Taliban government, theamount of coverage mentioning hisname continued to decline rapidly. ByMarch of 2002 he was mentioned infewer than 1,000 articles per month, alevel that stabilized but which wouldcontinue gradually to decline over thenext year and a half.

Likewise, Saddam Hussein had alsobeen mentioned in nearly 300 storiesover the two months before the attacks,but even following the attacks hisname came up in just 200 to 400 sto-ries per month through July of 2002.In August his coverage more than dou-bled to 956 stories, making him for thefirst time more widely covered thanOsama bin Laden. News attention toHussein doubled again in September to1,919 stories as the Bush administra-tion began pressing Congress to author-ize the use of military force againstIraq. But it was not until March of2003, with the start of the war againstIraq, that Saddam Hussein was men-tioned in more stories per month thanOsama bin Laden ever was in the af-termath of 9/11.

Thus, long before the war againstIraq actually commenced, and whileOsama bin Laden was still on the run,news coverage came to focus squarelyon Saddam Hussein and the situation inIraq. What caused this shift in publicattention?

FEATURES

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Scott L. Althaus is associate professor ofspeech communication and associate pro-fessor of political science at the University ofIllinois, Urbana-Champaign. His recentbook, Collective Preferences in DemocraticPolitics: Opinion Surveys and the Will of thePeople (Cambridge University Press, 2003),examines the communication processes bywhich ordinary citizens become equipped toexercise popular sovereignty in democraticsocieties.

Devon M. Largio is a first-year law studentat Vanderbilt University. Her undergraduatehonors thesis for the department of politicalscience at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, documented the rationales forgoing to war against Iraq that were voiced bythe Bush administration, Congress, and theAmerican media during the 2001–2002 pre-war period.

“Axis of Evil,” his public references toSaddam Hussein became more frequent.Beginning in April, references to Saddam Hussein outnumbered mentionsof Osama bin Laden. By this time, binLaden had largely disappeared from thepresident’s rhetorical field: between Mayof 2002 and August of 2003, PresidentBush mentioned bin Laden by name ononly eight occasions, while referring to Saddam Hussein in 185 public statements.

If April of 2002 marks the turn inpresidential emphasis from Osama toSaddam, it is notable that the newstrends in Figure 1 show no parallel shiftuntil several months later. And when theAssociated Press began mentioning Saddam more than Osama in August of2002, this shift occurred before President Bush began his campaign forcongressional authorization of forceagainst Iraq in September of 2002. Be-ginning in that month, and continuing inevery month until after the overthrow ofthe Iraqi regime in mid-2003, PresidentBush personalized his push against Iraqby naming Hussein more frequentlythan he had ever mentioned bin Laden.Presidential references to Husseinjumped from three in August of 2002 to18 in September and 31 in October, themonth of the congressional vote to au-thorize military action.

mentioned once, but following PresidentBush’s State of the Union speech inwhich Iraq was named as part of the

Prompting by the Bush Administration

The Bush administration began prepar-ing the American public for a war withIraq soon after the 9/11 attacks—by late2001 the Bush administration strategywas openly discussed as “Afghanistanfirst”—but the shift in media attentionfrom Osama to Saddam was not merelydue to the administration’s initiative. Asa complete accounting of this transforma-tion is beyond the scope of this brief ar-ticle, we encourage the interested readerto examine a detailed 200-page study ofthis case conducted by Devon Largio(available at http://www.pol.uiuc.edu/news/largio.htm). Here we will merelyexamine a small part of this larger story:the rhetorical shift from Osama to Saddam that occurred in the public state-ments of President Bush. For this analy-sis, we keyword-searched the publicstatements of the president3 for the sameterms that were examined in AssociatedPress coverage.

As shown in Figure 2, PresidentBush frequently discussed Osama binLaden in his public statements betweenSeptember and December of 2001, dur-ing the active phase of Operation En-during Freedom in Afghanistan. In con-trast, during this period he mentionedSaddam Hussein by name only once, inNovember. In January and February of2002, Saddam and Osama were each

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Figure 2Mentions of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, andthe War on Terrorism in Public Statements by PresidentGeorge W. Bush, July 2001–August 2003

Figure 1Mentions of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, andthe War on Terrorism in Associated Press Stories, July2001–August 2003

In short, Osama was the primary target in presidential rhetoric during thefall of 2001, but beginning in April of2002, Saddam became the president’smain rhetorical adversary. Yet there isan additional pattern in these trendsthat is especially revealing of the ad-ministration’s public relations strategy.Figure 1 shows that journalistic use ofthe term “War on Terrorism” peaked inOctober of 2001 before decliningsteadily thereafter. The president’s useof the term follows a very differentpattern.

In Figure 2, the president’s use ofthe term “War on Terrorism” first sur-faces in the month of the 9/11 attacks,peaks in October, and then falls off in November. But following the collapseof the Taliban in December of 2001,President Bush begins using the term“War on Terrorism” with increasingfrequency. President Bush’s use of theterm is particularly notable duringJune, July, and August of 2002, whenthis phrase is mentioned by the president between 13 and 19 times permonth, the most intense and sustaineduse of the phrase in presidential rheto-ric since it was first coined after the9/11 attacks. Suddenly, in Septemberof 2002, President Bush nearly stopsusing the term “War on Terrorism”and starts naming Hussein almostdaily. Indeed, “War on Terrorism” de-clines steadily as a stock phrase inpresidential rhetoric—its low point isMarch of 2003, the month in whichthe Iraqi invasion began. It is onlyresurrected in May of 2003 and forfour months thereafter, when it hadbecome clear that an active campaignof insurrection and resistance was occurring against the American occu-pation in Iraq.

This unusual pattern in the president’sspeeches—rising attention to the war onterror following the Afghan campaigncoupled with a sudden focus on SaddamHussein while Osama bin Laden ispushed rhetorically out of sight—becomes especially notable in light of adiscovery trumpeted in the Americanmedia around this same time. In mid-August and September of 2002, a seriesof polls conducted by different surveyorganizations found that majorities ofAmericans believed Saddam Husseinwas personally responsible for the 9/11attacks. As journalists publicly marveledat the degree of misinformation revealedin these results—not even the Bush ad-ministration was asserting such a directconnection—the seemingly obvious implication was that political leadershad somehow deceived the Americanpublic.

Was the Public Duped?

Had the switch in administrationrhetoric from bin Laden to Hussein,along with linking Saddam Hussein tothe War on Terror, misled Americansinto supporting a military campaignagainst Iraq? At first glance, the evi-dence in support of this conclusionseems compelling: American beliefsabout Hussein’s culpability surfacedonly after the Bush administrationshifted its attentions from Osama toSaddam and began discussing Saddamin connection with the War on Terror-ism. Moreover, the only poll resultbearing on Saddam’s culpability that re-ceived public attention in the immediateaftermath of the attacks seemed to con-firm that few Americans saw a directconnection between Hussein and 9/11.Appearing in a New York Times articletwo weeks after 9/11,4 the CBS/NewYork Times poll found that 45% ofAmericans laid sole blame for the at-tacks on Osama bin Laden, another21% blamed Osama bin Laden and oth-ers, but only 2% said that Saddam Hussein was solely responsible, and an-other 6% said Hussein and bin Ladenwere jointly responsible.

However, this popular reading of thesequence of events is mistaken. While

the Bush administration clearly aimed tolink Saddam Hussein to Osama binLaden and the War on Terrorism, ouranalysis of all available survey data re-veals that the American public neededno convincing on this point. While itappeared from publicly-reported surveysthat Americans initially blamed Osamaand only later blamed Saddam, ouranalysis shows that Americans werewilling to blame Saddam immediatelyafter 9/11 when survey respondentswere presented with that possibility. In-deed, rather than seeing a sudden spikein Saddam’s culpability around the firstanniversary of the 9/11 attacks, ouranalysis shows a steady decline in thepercentage of Americans willing toblame Saddam, a percentage that hasbeen dropping ever since the first daysfollowing 9/11.

Using the iPOLL database maintainedby the Roper Center for Public OpinionResearch, we found every publicly-available survey question that askedAmericans whether Saddam Husseinmight be responsible for the 9/11 at-tacks. Six survey organizations askedrelevant questions that were repeated atleast once; the trends from these ques-tions are shown in Figure 3 (the word-ing of questions posed by these organi-zations is given in Table 1).

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Figure 3Percentage of Americans Holding Saddam HusseinResponsible for the 9/11 Attacks, Sept. 2001–May2004

“Who do you think is more responsiblefor the recent terrorist attacks on theNew York World Trade Center and thePentagon?” Without prompting, 57%named Osama bin Laden and only 3%named Saddam Hussein. However, whenasked who “is the second most responsi-ble,” 27% spontaneously mentioned Saddam Hussein. This suggests that inthe immediate aftermath of 9/11, Americans primarily blamed bin Ladenbut were already willing to believe Hussein was involved. This pattern be-comes even clearer in a Harris Interac-tive poll conducted two days after the9/11 attacks. In an open-ended questionwhich asked “If Congress were to de-clare war, who do you think it shoulddeclare war against or aren’t you sure?”61% said they were not sure. But 25%named either Afghanistan, the Taliban, orOsama bin Laden; while only 6% men-tioned Iraq or Saddam Hussein. Yetwhen presented with a forced-choicequestion later in the same poll, fully78% said that it was very or somewhatlikely that “Saddam Hussein is person-ally involved in Tuesday’s terrorist attacks.”

A few other early forced-choice ques-tions that were never repeated reinforcethe conclusion that Americans were predisposed to blame Saddam Husseinfor the attacks. A Gallup poll on September 21, 2001 found that if theU.S. took military action to retaliate,68% of Americans believed that

When seemingly minor differences in question wording lead to such largedisparities in survey results—the earlyFebruary PIPA poll shows 8 in 10 Amer-icans believing Saddam had no direct in-volvement, while the early February Harris polls shows 7 in 10 Americansbelieving Saddam was personally behindthe attacks—survey researchers typicallypresume that the public’s views are ill-formed and uncrystallized. However, thestory in this case is more complicatedand nuanced. Our interpretation of theavailable data suggests most Americanswere inclined to believe that Saddamwas behind the attacks when explicitlypresented with this possibility in forced-choice questions that required respon-dents to choose from a list of possibleanswers. But few spontaneously volun-teered such a connection when presentedwith open-ended questions asking whothey thought was responsible.

Open-ended questions that recordedthe unprompted, verbatim answers givenby survey respondents consistently re-vealed that Americans were more likelyto blame Osama bin Laden for the ter-rorist strikes. The late September, 2001CBS/New York Times poll that foundonly 8% believed Saddam Hussein mighthave had something to do with the at-tacks was using an open-ended question.Similar results were found with otheropen-ended questions in the early polls.Three days after the 9/11 attacks, Wirthlin Worldwide asked respondents

The earliest polls were conducted twodays after the 9/11 attacks by Harris In-teractive and in October and Novemberby Opinion Dynamics. Using similarquestions, both organizations found thatnearly 8 in 10 Americans believed Saddam Hussein was responsible for theterrorist attacks. By late 2002 and early2003, belief in Hussein’s responsibilityhad dropped to around 71% in the Harrispolls, but as shown in Figure 3, othersurveys using differently worded ques-tions were registering lower levels ofmisperception. In early February of 2003,Princeton Survey Research Associatesfound that 57% of Americans believedHussein “helped the terrorists in the September 11th attacks,” but CBS/NewYork Times found that only 42% ofAmericans thought Hussein “was person-ally involved in the September 11th at-tacks.” The first PIPA poll on mispercep-tions, the only poll that allowed respon-dents to choose among differing levels ofculpability, was also conducted duringthis time. Using this more sensitive ques-tion format, PIPA found that only 20%believed “Iraq was directly involved incarrying out the September 11th attacks.”Another 36% believed that “Iraq gavesubstantial support to al Qaeda, but wasnot involved in the September 11th at-tacks”; 29% agreed that “a few al Qaedaindividuals visited Iraq or had contactwith Iraqi officials”; and the remaining7% believed “there was no connection atall” between Iraq and al Qaeda.

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Table 1Survey Questions about Saddam Hussein’s Responsibility for 9/11

CBS/New York Times “Do you think Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11th (2001) terroristattacks (against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon), or not?”

Gallup “Do you think Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11th (2001) terroristattacks (against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon), or not?”

Harris Interactive “How likely is it that Saddam Hussein [is/was] personally involved in [Tuesday's/the] terrorist attacks (on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon September 11, 2001)? Would you say that it is very likely, somewhat likely, not very likely, or not at all likely?” (Figure 3combines very and somewhat likely)

Opinion Dynamics “How likely is it that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11 (2001) terrorist attacks (on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon)? Very likely, somewhat likely, not very likely, or not at all likely?” (Figure 3 combines very and somewhat likely)

Princeton Survey Research 10/02 and 2/03: “And what’s your opinion, based on what you've heard or read: do you believe Associates Saddam Hussein helped the terrorists in the September 11th (2001) attacks (on the World

Trade Center and the Pentagon), or don’t you think he was involved?”9/03 and 1/04: “Do you think Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was directly involved in

planning, financing, or carrying out the terrorist attacks (on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon) on September 11th, 2001, or not?”

Program on International “Please select what you think is the best description of the relationship between the Iraqi Policy Attitudes/Knowledge government under Saddam Hussein and the terrorist group al-Qaeda: (1) There was no Networks connection at all; (2) A few al Qaeda individuals visited Iraq or had contact with Iraqi

officials; (3) Iraq gave substantial support to al Qaeda, but was not involved in the September 11th attacks; (4) Iraq was directly involved in carrying out the September 11th attacks. (Figure 3 shows % saying that Iraq was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks)

“removing Saddam Hussein from powerin Iraq” would be a very importantgoal, and another 22% said it would bea somewhat important goal. Likewise,during the first week of October, 2001,Techno Metrica Institute of Polling andPolitics presented Americans with a listof “different things that the UnitedStates could do in its fight against ter-rorism.” When asked “How important isremoving Saddam Hussein from power,”fully 62% said it was “extremely impor-tant,” and another 24% indicated that itwas somewhat important.

Although the popular impression isthat public misperceptions of SaddamHussein’s role in 9/11 must have grownin the year following the attacks, ouranalysis shows a general decline in thebelief that Saddam was responsible.Most of the trends in Figure 3 tend todiminish over time. The main excep-tions are the PIPA trend, which is lowand stable, and the spike in culpabilityregistered in the CBS/NYT trend aroundthe start of the 2003 Iraq war. It ap-pears that rather than becoming duped,as the popular account has it, the American public has gradually grownmore critical of the idea that Husseinhad a hand in 9/11.

Why wasn’t this noticed before? Ourscan through the Nexis/Lexis news data-base suggests that the early polls re-ceived almost no public attention. In-deed, the only relevant survey datareported in national newspapers andwire service reports was the open-endedCBS/New York Times question asked inlate September of 2001. This lack of at-tention to the early polls is certainly un-derstandable given the flood of coverageon the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks andthe start of the Afghanistan campaign.But the lack of public attention to theseearly data made the levels of misper-ception “discovered” in the weeks sur-rounding the first anniversary of 9/11seem a new and startling development.This was compounded by the findingthat no open-ended versions of the“who’s responsible” question were asked

after late September of 2001. Sinceopen-ended questions registered the low-est levels of culpability for SaddamHussein, the universal switch to forced-choice formats in the spate of polls thatsuddenly appeared in the weeks sur-rounding the first anniversary of the9/11 attacks seems to have overstatedthe degree to which Americans laid theblame for 9/11 at the feet of SaddamHussein.

ConclusionThe shift from Osama to Saddam oc-

curred in media coverage during Augustof 2002, but began four months earlierin the public statements of PresidentGeorge Bush. As Osama bin Ladenfaded in news coverage and all but dis-appeared in President Bush’s publicstatements, clear efforts were made bythe Bush administration to replaceOsama bin Laden as America’s foremostenemy by linking Saddam Hussein tothe War on Terror.

Yet the American public needed noconvincing on the possibility that Hussein was involved in 9/11. In pollstaken in the days immediately follow-ing the 9/11 attacks, open-ended ques-tions showed that Americans were notspontaneously blaming Iraq for the attacks. But forced-choice questionsshowed that as many as 8 in 10 Amer-icans thought that Hussein was proba-bly behind them. When explicitly presented with the possibility in theimmediate aftermath of the 9/11 at-tacks, Americans by wide margins werealready prepared to believe that Saddam was to blame long before theadministration began building popularsupport for the war.

The American public’s apparentlywidespread belief that Saddam Husseinwas responsible for the 9/11 terror at-tacks was no feat of misdirection by theBush administration. Instead, the Bushadministration inherited and played intoa favorable climate of public opinion,which may have greatly facilitated its

task of building public support for waragainst Iraq. The mistaken belief thatSaddam Hussein was responsible for the9/11 attacks was already widespreadamong Americans long before PresidentBush began publicly linking SaddamHussein with the War on Terrorism. In-deed, nearly seven months before the9/11 attacks, an Opinion Dynamics pollin late February of 2001 found that73% of Americans said it was very orsomewhat likely that “Saddam Husseinwill organize terrorist attacks on UnitedStates [sic] targets to retaliate for the airstrikes” that had recently been con-ducted in Iraq by American and Britishair forces.

Our analysis of surveys about the mis-taken belief that Hussein was responsiblefor 9/11 also suggests that the degree ofmisperception was overstated in manypolls. This was partly due to the univer-sal switch to forced-choice survey ques-tions after September, 2001, which exaggerated the degree to which Americans saw a connection betweenHussein and the 9/11 attacks. The otherreason was that most questions only permitted respondents to assess the likeli-hood that Hussein was involved in 9/11,rather than allowing them to choosefrom a range of alternative options fea-turing different degrees of involvement.The only survey to have done this, con-ducted by the Program on InternationalPolicy Attitudes and Knowledge Net-works, found that fewer than a quarter ofAmericans saw a direct tie between Hus-sein and the terror attacks in New Yorkand Washington, D.C.

News coverage and presidential rhetoric may have replaced Osama with Saddam over time, but Saddam was onthe short list of most likely suspectsfrom the beginning for most Americans.Rather than showing a gullible publicblindly accepting the rationales offeredby an administration bent on war, ouranalysis reveals a self-correcting publicthat has grown ever more doubtful ofHussein’s culpability since the 9/11 attacks.

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Notes1. We also searched for the term “Iraq,”

which produced similar results as “SaddamHussein.” For details on the “Iraq” patterns aswell as the New York Times analysis, see DevonLargio (2004) Uncovering the Rationales forthe War on Iraq, available at http://www.pol.uiuc.edu/news/largio.htm.

2. Interestingly, only 2,299 AP stories included references to both bin Laden and Hussein.

3. These are available at www.white-house.gov, but we used the collection of“Speeches and Public Statements” main-tained by Project Vote Smart at www.vote-

smart.org because of its superior keywordsearch engine.

4. Richard L. Berke and Janet Elder, “ANation Challenged: The Poll; Poll Finds Support for War and Fear on Economy.” New York Times, Late Edition, A2 (September25, 2001).

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