Saddam Hussein Did 9/11

Researchers seeking to explain [pdf] why so many Americans believed the Bush Administration's lies linking Saddam Hussein to the September 11th attacks, have discovered that many people believed it in reverse, also known as getting it ass-backwards: they already accepted that their government would invade Iraq... and the 9/11 link made sense.

We identify a number of social psychological mechanisms voters use to maintain false beliefs in the face of disconfirming information, and we show that for a subset of voters the main reason to believe in the link was that it made sense of the administration’s decision to go to war against Iraq. We call this inferred justification: for these voters, the fact of the war led to a search for a justification for it, which led them to infer the existence of ties between Iraq and 9/11.

Does that make sense? Errrr...