On several occasions as a high school student in Raleigh, North Carolina, programs and competitions brought me into contact with students from rural parts of the state. Quite a few of them mentioned that they'd never met anyone of Indian descent before. I remember one girl asking, "Oh, you're Indian! do you know so-and-so?" The idea that India was a nation of nearly a billion people, most of whom do not know each other, was lost on her.
They were very nice people -- I was happy to have known them, and to have played some role in expanding their cultural horizons. But I wonder how significant that sort of lack of a diverse upbringing was in getting many people, especially in rural areas, to think there was a connection between Saddam and the 9/11 hijackers. If you haven't ever met any Arabs before, and you have only the vaguest sense of what the world outside America looks like, it probably becomes a lot easier to think that all those brown-skinned Allah worshippers are conspiring to destroy America.
So when I see that 41% of the country still thinks that Saddam was helping the 9/11 terrorists, I'm not all that surprised. A fifth of the population can't even find their own country on a map, and the natural flow of ignorant thoughts will blend Iraqi dictators with Saudi terrorists. And on an even more emotive level, the idea that attacking Iraq was a way to continue our vengeance against the perpetrators of 9/11 has to be based in the same kinds of attitudes. If Iraqis looked like Irishmen, I don't think Americans would've even considered invading the country as a plausible post-9/11 course of action.
