What do polling results mean?

Reuters reports the results of a recent poll:

About 60 percent of Americans surveyed said the United States should not intervene in Syria's civil war, while just 9 percent thought President Barack Obama should act.

I think you have to read polling results carefully. What would be the results if the question had been phrased differently? For example:

• Do you think the international community should sanction the Assad government in Syria for its use of poison gas to kill and injure hundreds of women and children? or
• Do you think that preventing the wider use of weapons of mass destruction, sanctions should be imposed on any government that uses them against civilians?
• Should the international community use all appropriate methods to enforce the international convention against the use of chemical weapons?

Or what if the question had been posed in the following way?

You have read that the government of Syria violated the international convention against the use of chemical weapons in an attack on civilians, including women and children, in an urban area. What do you think the response should be:

• nothing

• limited military response such as the use of cruse missiles or drones against chemical weapons depots

• military assistance to the anti-government forces

• an invasion to force regime change:

A friend of mine years ago wrote his thesis on the impact of a previous question on the answer to a subsequent question in a survey. Would there be a difference in response to the three questions if there was a previous question:

Do you think that the Assad government was justified in using poison gas against citizens who happened to live in a disputed neighborhood even though innocent women and children would be killed?

 Or if the preceding question had been:

Do you know that the Israelis made two airstrikes against Syrian weapons depots, apparently to deter their use of weapons of mass destruction, and that there were few or no repercussions on Israel?

Of course it is important for the president to not get too far ahead of public opinion. Thus it is important the polling be done and the results properly interpreted. However there is a reason that the founding fathers put the lead responsibility for foreign policy under the president with the advice and consent of the Senate. Few citizens have the foreign policy expertise of that the president has, nor do they enjoy the analytic services of the National Security Council, the Department of State, the Department of Defense and the Intelligence community. The Senate was chosen as the adviser rather than the House of Representatives to provide some greater distance from the passions that can be created in public opinion by inflammatory news reports.

I think of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt or President Lincoln, both of whom carefully brought along the opinion of the public that they needed to support the war efforts that they knew the nation needed.