Re: A Question Regarding Iraq: If Bad-Tempered Leftists Would Stop Calling Bush a Moron and a Criminal for Starting This War, Would There Be Many Republicans Still Supporting It?

On 27 Aug 2006 17:36:41 -0700, liberalhere@xxxxxxxxx wrote:


George Leroy Tyrebiter, Jr. wrote:
On 27 Aug 2006 10:01:40 -0700, "john fernbach"
<fernbach1948@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm a lefty and opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, but I wonder
if leftist critics of the war in these Google talk groups aren't
shooting ourselves in the foot in the way we talk about people who
support the war.

I wonder if we're helping to keep this horrible waste of life going,
simply by the way we talk about the supposed motives of its supporters.

No. President Bush is going to keep troops there no matter what people
think or do.

He's the decider. Not the public.

Some of us are labeling the pro-war folks "morons" and "idiots," some
are calling them war criminals and religious fanatics, etc. etc., for
continuing to support President Bush in a mismanaged military adventure
that many mainstream observers -- including a few top ranking generals
-- suggest the US is losing.


I doubt anyone is calling a war supporter a war criminal. I think we
all know that the war criminals are Bush administration figures.

And saying that may not be politically useful, but it's true.

Why the insults and the invective? Why keep insulting the prowar
people when the news reports indicate that they're already losing the
battle for American public opinion, just as the U.S. seems to have lost
Geo. Bush's ambitious bet that he could turn Iraq into a vibrant "Arab
democracy"?

Many species of animals have a built-in need to achieve social
dominance, humans included. Being top dog is worth working for. Not
from a rational point of view, but from the point of view of
evolutionary engineering. Efforts to achieve social dominace provide
clues to those seeking mates as to which would be better parents for
their child. That preference given to socially dominant members of the
group lead to a larger percentage of the species surviving. So though
keeping up with the Joneses obviously is stupid, from the point of
view of rationality for those now alive, and causes a great deal of
grief to most people, it does help generate offspring more likely to
survive.

And what we do here is related to that. Stating that your view is
superior to another's view is a way of asserting social dominace. I am
better suited for procreation than you are.

I met my wife on these pages, lying in the bed next to me right now,
and she was drawn to me because of my superior posting prowess.

That's an odd answer, but it's the truth.

Aside from making the anti-war people feel good, if not a bit better
than everyone else, what's being accomplished by hurling insults at
other people, some of whom may simply have been too frightened or
furious in the wake of 9-11 to think very clearly about how the US
needed to respond to the terrorist problem.

The assertion of superiority is part of the social dominance display
routine, which helps actually display dominance, which allows those of
child-bearing age select mates who will send superior genes into the
future.

I know it sounds stupid. But evolution is actually a lot smarter than
you are, is a lot smarter than I am, even though it may APPEAR weird.

Poetic, but illogical, Captain Kirk. Evolution is a throw of the DNA
dice. You can be a seven or craps; if you're points, it requires a few
more throws for the final outcome. Ain't no "smarts" involved.

If by accident the dice creates a person who is wired to demonstrate
his social dominance, and that accidentally created trait in a person
leads to his offspring being more likely to survive, then the trait of
displaying social dominance will emerge as more common among the
species. That accident has lead to the species having a trait useful
for its survival. I used the word "evolution is smarter" to refer to
the odd fact that by accident traits encouraging survival emerge. Such
that the process of survival traits may seem to us very odd - yet they
"work"


But Iraq is a weird case. You see, as a political abstract, Iraq can be
thought of as a daring roll of the dice. Looking at the oil resources
of the middle east versus those remaining in the US, given the
declining manufacturing abilities of the US driven by transfer of
critical technological industries to China and India, maybe the idea
was to use a convenient helpless country as the forward position to
control the one nation that could oppose the US and deny us the oil we
need to simply survive: Iran.

I think that's right, that a big part of the "real" motivation for the
attack on Iraq was a conscious decision to take a chance, in part
because the status quo sucked so badly that it thought taking a chance
might lead to a really big improvement and losing the gamble would not
likely be much worse than things already were in the middle east.



Of course, it can be said, if the above is true, the strategists failed
to take into consideration: a failed invasion strategy, a disasterous
plan for the occupation, the cost of war, the effect on world opinion,
the negative aspect of driving around an occupied city with "Shoot Me"
symbols on the vehicle, and the possibility of unexpected national
disasters and other problems.

(Personally, I think George attended one too many bible study group
meetings and "decidered" he could start the "end of times".)

I'm more interested in what motivated our leaders, not what their
front man, President Bush, thinks about these tihngs.

Vice President Cheney, with an office so close to that of the
President, with real knowledge of how the government works, and what
the issues are, with his troops stationed in so many key spots in the
government, is closer to being the real President than is President
Bush, IMO.

That's why his nickname at the CIA is Edgar, as in the guy who
controlled the dummy Charlie McCarthy.






If the hard-core Republican Right were calling us war opponents all of
the nasty names that some of us are calling the Bush supporters -- as
some of the rightwingers are in fact are doing -- how many of us would
change our political views on this war?

A few.

Not many, I think. You're going to cling to your own pride, your
stubborness, your determination never to give in, when someone you
can't respect starts labelling you an "idiot," "traitor," "***,"
"scumbag," etc. etc. for a political stance you're taking.

Yes. There are two issues here - the obvious stupidity of attributing
horrible traits to others just because they have an opinion different
from your own - and the value of asserting social dominance.
Actually, there is a third issue - the odds of changing someone's
opinion is the third.

Especially when you first adopted the stance for what seemed at the
time to be moral and patriotic reasons.


Rather than spitting out insults at the pro-war right, I think the
anti-war movement might do better to remind the diehard Bush supporters
of all of the good, patriotic, capitalist, pro-American military men
and politicians who have decided that this particular war is suicidal
folly.

I do that too. General Scowcroft, solid Republican, warned us that the
war would be a mistake etc. AND I call my opponents so stupid that I
don't really understand how they can figure out how to turn their
computer on.

I'm playing both sides of the street.

I wonder if we don't also have to show some sympathy, if not some
respect, for patriotic Americans who first decided that the US had to
invade Iraq because of what Bush, Cheney and a lot of the media were
saying about Saddam's WMD, his supposed ties with Al Qaida,and the
supposed eagerness of the Iraqi people for the Americans to come and
rescue them.

That might only encourage them to be lazy thinkers in the future.

Maybe if we totally humiliate them then the next time they will think
a bit more about the arguments pitched to them.

In fact, if we cut off one of their fingers for every type of WMD
which was not in Iraq, then maybe next time, when the Bush WH says
there are WMD in Iran, they will think twice before going along with
that unsupported claim.

I think holding people accountable for the damages they cause with
their behavior can guide them to better behavior in the future.

I suppose I should be more sympathetic, that in spanking them I should
be able to say with sincerity - this hurts me more than it hurts you -
but I am apparently too much of a son of a bitch to have such an
admirable view of their error. ANd their error is awesomely deadly for
a great many innocent people. AND I really think people COULD have
done a better job of - thinking - before the war.

It's not like they were incapable of thinking their way to a correct
decision.

IMO they were too lazy to do that. In most cases.


We on the left can criticize the pro-war patriots for ever believing a
word that came from George Bush's mouth, I suppose, but that's not
really fair.

So what? BLAME is applied because of its UTILITY. We BLAME in order to
induce better future behavior. Thus we punish sane premeditated
murder, because that act of blame will cause others to not murder. But
we do not punish someone who strangles his wife thinking that he is
squeezing lemons, because we are not going to stop a future insane
person from doing something which appears to him to be perfectly
normal and harmless.

So it's useful to BLAME those who were too lazy to think out the flaws
in President Bush's arguments for war even if it was mostly the fault
of President Bush. We want the public to reason better in the future,
so it's useful to BLAME them for poor thinking recently.

A lot of Americans, for reasons that seem mysterious to
me, regularly take the words of our presidents at face value.

And we can fix that - by blaming them when they faced a reasonable
logical path to a proper skepticism. Sometimes we just can't avoid
being tricked. Other times we can. THe case for the war in Iraq
happened to be peculiarly easily refuted, so it's not a bad idea to
blame those who failed to think about the arguments hard enough. Since
with a bit more effort they would, in many cases, have spotted the big
flaws in the pro-war argument.

Of course, all too often the presidents turn out to be liars -- Lyndon
Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan (a very skillful and persuasive
liar), Bill Clinton, and now George W. Bush, all turn out in retrospect
to have told huge whoppers. The journalists have a supposed rule to
cover this situation: "If his lips move," says one supposed rule of
journalism, "he's lying."

And a lot of the time they tell the truth too.

See this article for instance on how Presidents generally try damned
hard to live up to their campaign promises.

http://nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2001/0105nj1.htm

I actually have watched what Bush and Clinton said with great care.
Posting here is actually an amazingly great way of learing with
precision whether Presidents are lying or telling the truth. This may
seem self-serving, but the current President Bush has been
exceptionally dishonest. From the campaign in 2000 on he has great
contempt for us. IN part that may be because the press was focusing on
the theme of Clinton-liar-so-Gore-liar-too, they fit all news into
their templates, and so they gave Bush a free ride on some early lies.
So he learned he could lie with impunity. So he started doing it more
and more.

I think I can distinguish what I want to be true - my partisan bias -
from what really is true, in most cases. I guess we all think that but
I have maybe special reasons for thinking i can REALLY do it -and this
current guy really is the worst since LBJ at least. Or maybe Nixon.

Not that that much matters. Sorry for the digression.


But for the average American voter, especially the young voter or the
idealistic voter who likes to believe we can trust our leader, this
kind of cynicism is a very hard pill to swallow. Naturally, then, many
people believed George W. when he declared that Saddam had weapons of
mass destruction -- possibly, George believed it himself.

No. Before the war the UN inspectors went in and tested our evidence.
Our evidence was almost completely claims of defectors. The US CIA
gave the UN inspectors about a hundred sites to visit, to test the
defector claims. Came back zero for one hundred. THus before the war
it was clear that our evidence for WMD was without basis.

AND more importantly, the presence or absence of WMD was not a
rational basis for war. Iraq MIGHT have had some old artillery shells.
SO WHAT?

The CIA told president Bush that even if they had left over some old
artillery shells - the alleged WMD - they would not use them unless
faced with regime destruction.

AND these old shells would by 2003 be stale, not militarily useful.

AND the argument that saddam might give them to terrorists is not a
case for war. Because Terrorists can get such stuff many places, or
make their own. They can get such stuff with or without Iraq.

So the argument that President Bush was sincere in saying war was
justified because of Saddam's storehouse of WMD - is not plausible.

We had no real evidence he had them. If he had them, they would not by
now be deadly. If he had some still viable - he would not use them.
Nor would he give them away, but if he did - so what? The recipients
did not need Saddam to get such stuff.

President Bush clearly invaded Iraq for reasons beyond WMD.

That's the sort of thing I mean by saying - it shoud have been easy
for voters to spot the flaws in the Bush arguments.

So can we blame our fellow Americans for having been taken in, back in
2002 and 2003?

Yes we can, because the reason we BLAME is to induce better future
behavior.

And can we blame Americans who were shocked and infuriated by the 9-11
attacks for thinking that somehow, someway, "Muslim radicals" needed to
be punished for this act -- and who cared if the US actually got the
Muslim radicals responsible, instead of striking at the wrong targets?

Well, sure we can blame them. Killing innocents is bad for business.
Killing innocents causes harm - the deaths - but does not have any
useful prophylactic value on the other side - innocents can not be
induced by their innocent behavior to improve their future behavior.

What the American left needs to do for the American right today, I
think, is help the war hawks to climb down from their own mistaken
positions, which have been discredited by the flow of events. We need
to give them some formula for admitting that they were wrong about some
or most aspects of this war, without having to endure public
humiliation and name-calling. We need to help them be somewhat sane in
their patriotism again, instead of self-destructive.

Good idea for Howard Dean. Here it doesn't much matter.

How do we do that? Not by demonizing other people for having been
wrong about this
absurd and destructive conflict, I think. If we were in their shoes,
and were fed the same media propaganda they were exposed to, we might
have made just the same mistakes they did.

Sure. And if we blame them for their errors now we may not get as many
votes as we might, but maybe we can shame them into thinking a bit
harder next time.

.