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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (124430)	2/7/2004 2:40:51 AM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 281500

Hi Neocon; Re: "Let us concede that he did not have a great internal struggle over killing people en masse, when occasion arose<g>." It's traditional in human society, when the decision is made to kill large numbers of people, to classify them as "others" in some way. So Saddam would see the Kurds or Iranians as not his own people. For killing Iraqis, the victims would be called "traitors". This is not something unique about Saddam. It is universal human behavior. Few people care much about enemy dead in battle, except those who must actually do the killing. For the leaders it's easy. You just classify the enemy as whatever type of obnoxious "other" suits yourself at the moment. For the Iraq war, the classifications are terms like "Baathist", "terrorist", "occupier", "infidel", "sand n-----", "fundamentalist", "aggressor", "zionist", "towel head", etc. What's equally amazing is that after the war is over, you can redefine the enemy to be fully human again without much effort. -- Carl