[lbo-talk] Call up of thousands of reservists for a ground invasion

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Fri Jul 21 09:07:00 PDT 2006


Doug:

How motivated are these people? How does Israel avoid the Vietnam problem? Are these wars popular enough that conscripts don't get high and frag their bosses?

[WS:] You do not see much of it when the war (popular or not) is going well. It is only when things are not going well on the battlefield that people start having second thoughts.

It makes sense from the social interactionist point of view claiming that people tend to act according to the "logic" of the social situation they are in rather than according to their ideas, values and preferences inscribed in their brains or psyche. A successful war creates a bandwagon effect, even among those who were originally skeptical (cf. Gulf War I). People start questioning the war and their roles in it only when the fighting drags on without making things better on the ground.

Wojtek



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