Ordinarily, polls are not very useful in the policy business. A bad idea does not suddenly become a good one merely because some magic percentage of respondents fails to see its flaws.

Occasionally, however, public opinion is a strategically important factor, even if the opinion of the majority is palpably false. Anyone who underestimates the dangerous power of large numbers of wrong-headed people has failed to consider the storied history of mob lynching.

This observation is applicable to Wednesday’s lead story in USA Today, which describes the results of a recent Gallup poll in nine Islamic countries regarding September 11, the war in Afghanistan, and America generally. These results belie much of the more absurd current wisdom about Muslims and Arabs.

A selection of statistics:

89 percent of Kuwaitis and 86 percent of Pakistanis do not believe that Arabs executed the September 11 attacks.

89 percent of Indonesians and 78 percent of Iranians believe that U.S. military action in Afghanistan is morally unjustifiable.

64 percent of Saudis, 62 percent of Jordanians, 68 percent of Pakistanis and 63 percent of Iranians say they hold an “unfavorable” opinion of the U.S.

36 percent polled in Kuwait, the country that the U.S. liberated from Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War, call the September 11 attacks “morally justifiable.” Just 17 percent of Kuwaitis applied that phrase to U.S. military action in Afghanistan.

These numbers indicate one thing: at the level of political organization, some of our “allies” in the Islamic world are scarcely distinguishable from our enemies.

Consider these numbers the next time you hear someone calling Islam “a great and peaceful religion hijacked by a few extremists.” Consider what the refusal of airport security officials to “ethnically profile” indicates about whether even we believe and understand the implications of the fact that all of the September 11 terrorists were young Arab males. And consider how many more American lives might be sacrificed on the hellish altars of political correctness, cultural sensitivity and “internationalism” if we fail to face the cold and potentially murderous hatred reflected in these poll numbers.