A followup, in a way, to the "Everybody shut up" post. I have Bolded a line I think is telling and true for a lot of the left. WSJ.com
Opinion Overload
The Iraq debate proves politics remains the same.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, February 28, 2003 12:01 a.m.
Can there be anything stranger than the never-ending prelude to this war in Iraq? We may live in an age of instant communication, but the run-up to war has seemed like something from antiquity--armies massing on the plain for months, the French and Prussian ambassadors exchanging views via carrier pigeon and code. Amid the year-long negotiations, word comes that the Outer Kingdom of North Korea is firing missiles into the ocean. Meanwhile in Manhattan the residents gather rations and make plans to bicycle toward the Catskills if plague arrives, as it did to Athens during its war with Sparta, in 430 B.C.
But this isn't 430. It's 2003, when the World Wide Web, e-mail, television, newspapers and blabbing public officials ensure, more than any time in history, that everyone is looking at the same page. Why, then, such discord?
Well, first we have to assume that the degree of discord is real, rather than a distortion, mainly reflecting the fact that newspapers and television, since their beginnings, have held the attention of audiences by turning all reality into melodrama. Thus, every objecting burp out of the United Nations or Paris gets splashed across someone's front page or TV gabfest at the level of Code Red relevance. But even discounting the media's tendency to overweight hot air, the sheer volume of information available about Saddam Hussein's Iraq might suggest more consensus than appears to exist about the need to eliminate, rather than just talk about, the threat.
Maybe it's possible that in the age of information, more is less. More information breeds more opinion, and when that opinion is political opinion, the result is not greater agreement on the facts, but merely deeper division along well-chiseled fault lines. That's obviously what we have now on Iraq. Political belief--and animosity toward one's political opposition--trumps everything, including mortal danger.
Joseph Schumpeter, the eminent political economist, believed that while the average person was logical enough in personal matters, he "drops down to a lower level of mental performance . . . as soon as he enters the political field"--and stays there "in the face of meritorious efforts" to put facts before his face.
If Schumpeter is correct, much of the opposition to war with Iraq is more than anything the politics of liberals here and the left in Europe who would not abide being led anywhere by a conservative U.S. administration. Hell no, they won't go, no matter how many resolutions are outputted by the Security Council.
UNSCOM inspected inside Iraq for nearly eight years and issued umpteen reports, all available online. The vats in the photograph here do not hold "vaccine." According to paragraphs 146 and 147 of UNSCOM's final 1999 Disarmament Report to the Security Council:
"146. . . . In 1990 additional research locations were obtained at the Foot and Mouth Disease Vaccine Institute at Daura and apparently the Agriculture and Water Resources Centre at Fudhaliyah. Research on viruses was started by Dr. Hazem Ali and genetic engineering with Dr. Ali Nuria Abdel Hussein. The logic and intent for the selection of camelpox virus, infectious haemorrhagic conjunctivitis virus and rotavirus are not stated in the FFCD [Full Final and Complete Disclosure]. The objectives for the genetic engineering unit are not elaborated upon, although testimony of Dr. Rihab Taha has indicated initially antibiotic resistant strains of Bacillus anthracis spores were to have been derived. Any relationship with that of the genetic engineering section of Al-Muthanna housed at the Serum and Vaccine Institute at Amiriyah under the direction of Dr. Al-Za'ag is denied.
"147. Iraq's failure to identify and to present technically and scientifically competent staff who will accept intellectual and management responsibilities for the balance and emphasis of the research programme, the planning and development of the research programme makes the determination of the overall extent of the programme difficult."
After a decade's brave work, the U.N. has shown that Saddam's Iraqi palaces have been heaped up with toxic anthrax and botulism, the first sovereign power based on viruses. So? On the subways of ineffably liberal New York, where two tall buildings fell, they wear buttons: "Why War?"
We in the West have found a reasonable if imperfect mechanism for the ofttimes irrational world of political gridlock--elections. You present what information you have and see what the body politic thinks. The government that results governs across its term in office subject to review and, on schedule, a national vote. In fact, that is the political system being proposed for Iraq, as opposed to whatever politics is inside those "vaccine" vats. Those of us who voted for this U.S. administration believe that change in Iraq must come now, by force of arms if necessary. Those opposed can, and will, work to make someone else president. They will find out if they are right, next year. For now, the noise.http://opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=110003137 |
