A new poll has revealed unsettling insight into the foreign policy savvy of US voters. Amid unsurprising numbers on the presidential race (Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are still ahead) the Dec.18 survey by Public Policy Polling offers this tidbit: Nearly 25% of respondents—30% Republicans and 19% of Democrats—say they would support the bombing of Agrabah.
The fact that Agrabah is the fictional kingdom in Disney’s 1992 film “Aladdin” was not disclosed to poll respondents. According to the Raleigh, North Carolina-based polling firm, Trump supporters are most likely to favor military intervention in Agrabah, with 41% advocating the destruction of the flat, immense, and entirely nonexistent desert regime.
Americans’ willingness to agree to attacks on a place they know nothing about has, of course, led to some fine moments on Twitter.
The same ignorance was also on disturbing display earlier this week during the foreign policy debate between Republican nominee hopefuls, where New Jersey governor Chris Christie claimed he could be a trusted ally to King Hussein of Jordan, now dead for 16 years. Meanwhile, when asked by moderators if he’d be willing to bomb the Syrian city of Raqqa, senator Ted Cruz replied, “You would carpet bomb where ISIL is—not a city, but the location of the troops.”
Raqqa, the declared capital of ISIL, had a pre-war civilian population of more than 220,000 in 2004. Many remain there under ISIL’s control. Imagining that the city and terror group’s troops occupy two conveniently separate locales is as much of a fantasy as Aladdin’s big blue genie.