[lbo-talk] Pew study of poll accuracy

Carl Remick carlremick at hotmail.com
Wed Apr 21 08:57:45 PDT 2004



>From: Jon Johanning <jjohanning at igc.org>
>
>On Tuesday, April 20, 2004, at 07:02 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>>Well, yeah, but... "We" aren't the ones getting attacked in Iraq. Our
>>soldiers invaded the country, and Iraqis are trying to blow them up. "We"
>>wouldn't be getting attacked if "we" hadn't gone there in the first place.
>
>Well, yeah, but... that's the way you and I and all of our friends think
>about it, but a lot of plain ol' Amur'cans think, "Hey, we were on the way
>to making the place a showplace of democracy, and then that firebrand Sadr
>and the ex-Saddam-lovers started seriously shooting at our boys and girls,
>so of course we have to hit them hard."

Except an awful lot of these "boys and girls" are just hired guns of outfits like Blackwater Security Consulting, who are interesting in netting $1000/day not making Iraq "a showplace of democracy."


>(2) Ordinary Amur'cans, unlike folks like us (or at least me, to speak for
>myself), have a rather intense emotional identification with the nation. So
>they have an intense need to constantly prove that they are members in good
>standing of the group which they rely on to protect them. And remember,
>this protection is not just a matter of simple physical security, it is all
>emotional -- your country protects you from whatever symbolic spooky evil
>entities might be running around in the universe (which of course are
>really things in people's heads).

Such poor babies, ordinary Amur'cans. Foreign policy isn't supposed to be a feel-good exercise, an arena where people simply indulge tribalistic delusions about the world. So long as the American public remains mired in illusion about the world, the nation will be bogged down in endless military conflicts with endless streams of body bags returning home. I don't think you can wake up this nation by whispering lullabies in its ear and continuing to indulge its fantasies that foreigners -- not the insane crew running the US government -- threaten the safety of the US public.

Carl

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