Hi Rascal; Re: "I send letters to Congress all the time."
When trying to argue with right wingers about Iraq, it's important to remember the basic psychological differences between the right and the left.
It's sometimes said that left wing wants to treat people as if they were youth (i.e. take care of them), while the right wing wants people treated as if they were adults (i.e. laissez faire), but I don't think that this is quite accurate. Instead of "youth" and "adult", I would substitute "child" and "parent", where child is used in the sense of a child being taken care of by a parent. This is only a little different from the concept of youth/adult, where the distinguishing difference is in how we perceive their ability to make decisions for themselves, but I think the difference is enough to make it a more useful dichotomy.
The two most significant relationships that humans participate in are that of being a child, and that of being an parent. These relationships are more important than those between man and woman for the genetic reason that blood runs thicker than water, and the accuracy of this can be observed when couples with children divorce.
The left wing wishes for a government that takes care of people as a parent would, so it's not surprising that youth tends towards the left. But the parallels go much farther. In order to find their place in the world, youth must explore, the opposite of the right wing's tendency towards tradition. Parents, and the right wing, worry about costs, children and the left wing, worries about what people need. In terms of the "liberty / equality / brotherhood" versus "duty / honor / country" division, children want freedom (i.e. liberty) while parents are concerned with work (i.e. duty). Children, being in a subservient position in society, strive to be treated fairly (i.e. equality). Every parent soon discovers that humans make natural and artful liars, and most try to combat this tendency (at least to keep their children in line), by stressing the importance of truth (i.e. honor). Similarly, most parents try to instill patriotism (i.e. country) into their children, while children experience the more general emotion of empathy (i.e. brotherhood).
The subject of war cannot be separated from death, and the political division is important in this subject as well. Children feel that everything is immortal, and are shocked to discover that not only can death claim their pet turtle, their parents, and their friends but that it can even happen to them. Adults eventually get used to this fact, and realize that not only can death claim the above list, but that it inevitably will.
So the left wing cares a lot more about death than the right wing does. To the right wing, death is an inevitable fact of life on this planet. It is something that will happen to every living thing, it's just a matter of when. This inevitability makes the horrors and sacrifices of war less painful to the right than to the left. What better place to die than on a battle field, in defense of your country, honorably following your duty, where your closest friends are present and sharing the same risks? Yes civilians are inevitably killed, but all life on the planet dies eventually, and if the cause is just, the right sees this as a less important problem than the left sees it as.
So don't go on and on about civilian casualties. Where the right feels uncomfortable about war is when it is in violation of Duty, Honor and Country, not Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood.
And if you look at the right wing columnists that are complaining about Bush, you will see that what they are harping on is the lying about WMDs or the several agreements to not attack Iraq unless it failed to disarm (i.e. Honor), cutting Congress out of the declaration of war loop, and sending US troops into an untenable position (i.e. Duty), and the failure of the war on terror and the alienation of America's allies (i.e. Country).
The Clinton scandal played out amongst the two parties for the same reason. That the Republicans largely voted to impeach him was not entirely for partisan reasons. Republicans just naturally care more about Duty and Honor than do the Democrats.
The Neocon error in predicting an easy Iraq occupation was from a failure in empathy. They knew that our military is very strongly devoted to Duty, Honor and Country, but they failed to realize that these ideals are not only the province of the US military, but are universal to some percentage of the human species (just as the parent / child relationship is universal), and that therefore many Iraqis, both civilian and military, would also feel this way. They used the fact that the Iraqis did not fight well in Kuwait to support their theory that they would not fight at all in Iraq.
-- Carl |
