Decius wrote:
Were we to be more emotionally involved, would it impact the outcome? I think perhaps it might. I'm interested in what others think.

Of course it would. We're wired to react emotionally to people with whom we identify. We can identify with a kid on a college campus in Virginia. We can't identify with an Iraqi who, well, fuck, who knows what jobs they work over there or what their values are (slipping momentarily, if you'll allow, into the collective conciousness).

I'm 100% confident in taking the above as a given. The difficult question is how do you get people to identify with other people? What's the magic ingedient?

You'd think Christianity would do it, given that Jesus wasn't all "Love other white Americans... they're the ones you can trust." But that doesn't work because for most people, even supposedly devout people, that's all just words on a page. For too many, Christianity is ritual and comfort and social interaction, but it's not really a philosophy. So this arguably "Christian" nation doesn't have much to say about dead bodies in other countries... even dead American soldiers.

I used to think you did it by showing people the reality of the situation others are faced with. You start showing dead bodies and blown up markets and the public will start to get that these are people not so different from themselves and their death is something to be upset by. But now I think that just desensitizes everyone so much that pretty soon they're back to not really being affected by it.

I don't have the answer. For any given situation, people's moral sensibilities cause them to care to a degree that I'm not convinced is practically changable en masse. People either care enough to write their congressman or they don't... where on the scale of giving a shit that line falls is variable as well. And so too for every issue there is.

Also, it's not really appropriate to chastise Olbermann for making the statement he did without laying out some mystical 10 step plan for peace in Iraq. I'd love it if he had one, or, for that matter, if anyone had one, but no one appears to. And so nothing happens. Olbermann's job, perhaps, is just to get people pissed off enough that they start demanding that the folks that *should* be working on this issue, our elected leaders, get to it and figure something out. Make a decision, one way or the other.

Question 1 : Is civil war in Iraq inevitable? Answer based on fact, not ideology (good luck with that). No one here has the expertise to answer the question fully, but a consensus still has to be reached. Our leaders need to reach it.

If the answer to Question 1 is "Yes" then it's reasonable to ask why we should bother staying. Is it reprehensible to say "Sorry we fucked everything up and kicked off this civil war, but we're gonna cut our losses now that it's unavoidable" ? Yes, it sure is, but we already knew that starting this ridiculous war was reprehensible. If it's too late, then it's too late, so cutting one's losses -- in this case the loss of American lives and treasure -- is the only real solution. It sure sucks, but staying there in the midst of an intractable civil war starts to sound more like some fucked up version of penance than a logical foreign policy decision, or even a moral position. Our soldiers shouldn't die as someone else's penance.

RE: Bombings Kill at Least 146 Iraqis in Baghdad - New York Times