Make sure that you scroll down and look at the photos of all the other phony soldiers too. The reason for Rush’s deferment puts it into even better context.

In an alternet.org article entitled “The Mega-Lie Called the ‘War on Terror’: A Masterpiece of Propaganda,” Richard Behan sums up the evidence exposing the “War on Terror” for what it really is: a repulsive attempt to achieve world dominance through militaristic means.  The article includes a succinct chronology substantiating the author’s claims.

What is the basis for the “terror” of the “War on Terror”?  Good question: 

Impeachment will expose the fraudulence of the “War on Terror” and liberate us from the pall of fear the Bush administration has deliberately cast upon the country. Both political parties will be free to speak the truth: Terrorism is real and a cause for concern, but it is not a reason for abject fear.

We need only compare the hazard of al Qaeda to the threat posed by the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. On the one hand is a wretched group of sad fanatics — perhaps 50,000 in all — clever enough to commandeer airliners with box cutters. On the other was a nation of 140 million people, a powerful economy, a standing army of hundreds of divisions, a formidable navy and air force and thousands of nuclear tipped intercontinental missiles pre-aimed at American targets.

We were a vigilant but poised and confident people then, not a nation commanded to cower in fear. We can and must regain that strength and self-assurance.

What follows is an excerpt from an article from Salon.com entitled “Breaking the Iraq Stalemate.”

Trapped by reality, Bush can no longer use his time-tested rhetoric to rally America. Instead, he is forced to contradict his own grand ideological claims. His pathetic speech last week was a preview of what we are likely to see in the diminished last phase of his presidency. The grand rhetoric about “victory” was replaced by the weird CEO-like phrase “return on success,” an expression so plastic it radiated “corporate bullshit spin” from every syllable. Worse, Bush had to acknowledge the destructive facts on the ground. He had to deal with the painful reality that unless he extends tours of duty, which would be political suicide, he has to start bringing troops home, no matter what the situation in Iraq is. This forced him to make the absurd claim that the surge’s “success” in Iraq has made it possible to bring home 5,700 troops by Christmas. Disregarding the fact that these troops were slated to come home anyway, not even Bush’s most ardent supporters could believe that there is any actual connection between the allegedly “improving” situation in Iraq and the redeployment of 5,700 troops.

By insisting that the stakes in the war are nothing less than the fate of Western civilization, yet refusing to impose a draft or ask Americans to make real sacrifices, Bush has painted himself into a corner. If the war in Iraq is really the vital front line of the war against terror that Bush claims it is, he should not be pulling troops out, but pouring more in — even if it means reinstating the draft. For the first time, Bush’s actions explicitly belie his words. Bush, once the great and powerful war god, now comes across as a desperate politician hiding behind a curtain, trying to score popularity points by bringing troops home while simultaneously warning of apocalypse if we lose the war. Bush’s obvious hypocrisy and powerlessness, exacerbated by his lame-duck status, have caused him to lose his image of invincibility — the only thing he ever had going for him.

According to this article in Alternet, a British polling firm has concluded that “1.2 million Iraqis have met violent deaths since the 2003 invasion.”  More disturbing, Americans have no idea that their invasion has caused such misery and, for the most part, the American media doesn’t care about reporting these tragic numbers.

Field workers asked residents how many members of their own household had been killed since the invasion. More than one in five respondents said that at least one person in their home had been murdered since March of 2003. . .  In Baghdad, almost half of those interviewed reported at least one violent death in their household.

Americans have no idea about the amount of bloodshed in Iraq:

Here’s the troubling thing, and one reason why opposition to the war isn’t even more intense than it is: Americans were asked in an AP poll conducted earlier this year how many Iraqi civilians they thought had been killed as a result of the invasion and occupation, and the median answer they gave was 9,890. . . .  Most of that disconnect is probably a result of American exceptionalism — the United States is, by definition, the good guy, and good guys don’t launch wars of choice that result in over a million people being massacred.

As indicated, the American media has no interest in communicating an accurate picture of the Iraqi disaster to Americans, and the plan is working:

While the stunning figures should play a major role in the debate over continuing the occupation, they probably won’t. That’s because there are three distinct versions of events in Iraq — the bloody criminal nightmare that the “reality-based community” has to grapple with, the picture the commercial media portrays and the war that the occupation’s last supporters have conjured up out of thin air. Similarly, American discourse has also developed three different levels of Iraqi casualties. There’s the approximately 1 million killed according to the best epidemiological research conducted by one of the world’s most prestigious scientific institutions, there’s the 75,000-80,000 (based on news reports) the Washington Post and other commercial media allow, and there’s the clean and antiseptic blood-free war the administration claims to have fought (recall that they dismissed the Lancet findings out of hand and yet offered no numbers of their own).

The White House is fond of reminding us that the U.S. is not fighting alone in Iraq, but that we are part of a “coalition.” Marty Kaplan has this to say about that the president’s most recent affirmation that there is a 37 nation coaltion:

Moldova is in (12 troops), but Tonga is out. Bosnia & Herzegovina contributed as many as 37 soldiers in theater, but Slovakia and Hungary have pulled out. El Salvador has stayed, but Nicaragua has gone. Australia, yes; New Zealand, not so much. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, you betcha; Denmark and Norway, gone. Mongolia is in, but Ukraine is out. It appears that Kazahkstan’s 29 troops, and Armenia’s 46, are hanging in there, but Thailand has left the building.

For more, check these stats on Wikipedia. 

What if you told your spouse that you and a “coalition of 36 other friends” bought an expensive  boat?  But then what would your spouse say if he/she found out that you paid for 98% of the cost of the boat?  What if he/she found out, further, that you gave big bribes to the other members of the “coalition” in order to get them to “participate”? 

The following is an excerpt from a speech Barak Obama is scheduled to give today in Iowa:

We hear eerie echoes of the run-up to the war in Iraq in the way that the President and Vice President talk about Iran. They conflate Iran and al Qaeda. They issue veiled threats. They suggest that the time for diplomacy and pressure is running out when we haven’t even tried direct diplomacy. Well George Bush and Dick Cheney must hear - loud and clear - from the American people and the Congress: you don’t have our support, and you don’t have our authorization for another war.

I’m having a bit of trouble understanding all of the newly released reports coming out about Iraq.  Luckily for everyone, when Australia Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile recently asked President Bush for an update on Iraq, the President told him “We’re kicking ass.”

OK.  Fair enough.  That sums it up for me.  It’s terrific news and it’s about time.

Because we’re kicking ass over there, let’s schedule a parade through Bagdad.  Let’s have the Bush family lead the parade.  That includes George W., Laura and the twins. Let’s make it a big parade. We can have a prominent float on which Mr. Bush’s friends and co-workers can ride: Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove.  What the heck.  Bring everyone: Gonzales, Ashcroft, Scooter (I know that he’s free).  Let’ have everyone who ever worked closely with the President spread some red white and blue cheer.  This will give our highest ranking Republican officials a chance to mingle with the people we saved, the Iraqis.  Can you imagine Dick Cheney walking through the middle of Bagdad shaking hands with the people of Iraq and spreading the good news that we’re kicking the asses of those terrorists?

Let’s plan for our parade to stretch two or three miles through the center of Bagdad, so there’s room for everyone in Congress who authorized the invasion of Iraq.  Since we’re kicking ass, there’s no need for helicopters hovering overhead and there’s no need for anyone to wear flak jackets (like John McCain did during his visit).  Nor is there any need to bring in heavy security.  It’s time to give the military the day off in Iraq.  Call it something like “Iraqi Freedom Celebration Day.” Since we’re kicking ass, let’s announce to the people of Iraq (by dropping thousands of leaflets by helicopter at least a few weeks ahead of time) that this parade is a chance for the people of Iraq to come on out to meet the President of the United States, shake his hand and tell him what’s on your mind.  Maybe the President could dress up in his cowboy boots.   Or maybe he could ride his bicycle.  Let’s use this opportunity to show the citizens of Iraq that we’ll never hesitate to bring a bit of America to Iraq.

Let’s not forget that there are tens of thousands of Iraqi children whose parents have died during the Iraq liberation process.  Let’s construct a few thousand large parade floats on which they can ride, places of special prominence.

Let’s make the Parade Day an even bigger deal.  Let’s invite hundreds of American high school students to travel over to Bagdad with our President to join the parade, then to begin an student exchange program, say for a semester or two.  Our students can live with real Iraqi families outside of the Green Zone, since we’re kicking ass.  They can attend the finest Iraq high schools and colleges that still exist.  They can help tell the Iraqi students about American democracy.  They can tell the Iraqi students that in America, our political system works extra efficiently because money is speech.

In fact, since we’re kicking ass, isn’t it about time to open a few McDonalds and Starbucks in downtown Bagdad?  And how about putting a FOX News corporate office in the middle of town, right on an Iraqi Main Street, so that FOX reporters and editors can have easy access to the real people of Iraq:  those outside the Green Zone. 

Now that we’re kicking ass, let’s really start the reconstruction of Iraq.  I’m sure that many of the people who favored the U.S. invasion are retired folks.  Perhaps they would be willing to come to Bagdad to help fix up at least some of bombed out schools and mosques.  Let’s also invite thousands of American fundamentalists to make the trip too, so that they can open up one of their mega-churches in the heart of Bagdad.  They can tell the Iraqis to worship Jesus instead of Muhammad or Allah.  Now that we’re well on our way to saving the Iraqis from terrorists, we can get busy saving them from going to hell.

I’m getting excited even writing about this big parade.  Finally, this is our opportunity to step up to allow our President tell the people of Iraq, face-to-face, what he’s done for Iraq.

I recently discussed American foreign policy with an attorney over lunch.  Over the years, this fellow had generally shown himself to be thoughtful on many issues.  He is a meticulous lawyer, charged with parsing out bits of relevant evidence regarding the dozens of cases on which he works every day.

It eventually became clear that he fully supported the U.S. attack on Iraq, though he was agonized over how badly the “war” was going.  Why did he support the Iraq invasion?  This is where the conversation got strange:  Because of what “they” did to us (allegedly the 9/11 attacks).  It’s because of what “they” planned to do (impose Muslim culture on all Americans).  It’s because of what “they” stand for (”they hate freedom”).   Further, we simply need to make them pay.   We can’t let “them” get away with what “they” did on 9/11.  

It became clear through this conversation that, for my acquaintance, all Muslim countries are the same.  None of them can be trusted.  All of them are at least somewhat guilty for 9/11.   I challenged his over-generalizations, but my acquaintance would not back off.  For him, all Muslims are bad.  Further, it was clear to him that we couldn’t do nothing about 9/11.  Doing something (no matter what it was) is far better than doing nothing.

It has repeatedly occurred to me that without the federal government’s 6-year national license to engage in bigotry and misdirected vengefulness, the invasion of Iraq would have been extremely difficult to sell. Based upon numerous conversations I’ve had with people who supported the Iraq invasion, bigotry and misdirected vengefulness justified their support of the invasion.  For many people these things continue to justify any future U.S. military action in the Middle East.  “They” have it coming.

In “The Real Lessons of 9/11,” Gary Kamiya does a much-needed psychological analysis on those people who have supported the sustained and misdirected U.S. military violence in the Middle East.  Kamiya has really thought things through.  Kamiya’s Salon.com article is an extraordinary piece of writing.  The bottom line is that the mainstream media has not questioned the shameful emotions and ideology that justified Bush’s crusade in the minds of all too many people.  Here are a few excerpts from the article, but I highly recommend clicking on the link and reading the whole thing:

Six years ago, Islamist terrorists attacked the United States, killing almost 3,000 people. President Bush used the attacks to justify his 2003 invasion of Iraq. And he has been using 9/11 ever since to scare Americans into supporting his “war on terror.” He has incessantly linked the words “al-Qaida” and “Iraq,” a Pavlovian device to make us whimper with fear at the mere idea of withdrawing. In a recent speech about Iraq, he mentioned al-Qaida 95 times. No matter that jihadists in Iraq are not the same group that attacked the U.S., or that their numbers and effectiveness have been greatly exaggerated.

Sept. 11 is a totemic date for the Bush administration. It justifies everything, explains everything, ends all argument. It is the crime that must be eternally punished, the wound that can never heal, the moral high ground that can never be taken. Bush’s reaction to 9/11 was to declare a “war on terror,” of which the Iraq adventure was said to be the “front line.” The American establishment signed off on this war because of 9/11. To oppose Bush’s “war on terror” was to risk another terror attack and dishonor our dead.

Of course America was enraged and fearful after the attacks. But reacting to the attacks as we did, like an angry drunk in a bar, was not in our national interests. It was vital that we think clearly about our response, who attacked us, why they did, and what our most effective response would be. But here the American establishment ran up against its ideological blind spot — its received ideas about the Arab/Muslim world. Combined with the hysterical emotionalism, those ideas, which amount to a kind of de facto bigotry, allowed Bush to push through one of the most bizarrely gratuitous wars in history.

Sept. 11 was a hinge in history, a fork in the road. It presented us with a choice. We could find out who attacked us, surgically defeat them, address the underlying problems in the Middle East, and make use of the outpouring of global sympathy to pull the rest of the world closer to us. Or we could lash out blindly and self-righteously, insist that the only problems in the Middle East were created by “extremists,” demonize an entire culture and make millions of new enemies.

This one is difficult to watch because O’Reilly is so utterly condescending and so unwilling to allow his guest (Ron Paul) to speak. The debate does capture the neocon perspective (O’Reilly) and Paul’s view, to which I am sympathic. Ron Paul argues that our “troubles” in the Middle East are largely blowback for inappropriate actions the U.S. has taken for decades in the Middle East. We have been interfereing in Middle East politics in grotesque ways, installing puppet leaders and acting under the assumption that it is our oil under their sand.

Now, our policies regarding Iran are causing the Iranian government to associate all internal Iranian dissent with the United States, which has led to the squelching of dissent. We caused many of our own problems in the Middle East by ramping up tensions with our preemptory invasion of Iraq, our rhetoric and our conduct in building permanent military bases all over the region, including 14 permanent bases in Iraq alone.

Check out these bizarre photos of our Commander in Chief during his recent visit to Iraq. These photos are posted by Abu Aardvark, along with some provocative commentary. 

It’s been interesting watching Ron Paul hammer the other candidates of both parties on the issues Iraq and our out-of-control deficit economy. The Republican elite and the corporate media have no idea of what to do with Paul–he just won’t fall in line.

Here are a couple examples of Ron Paul articulating his positions on these two issues (and others).

Who are “they”?  Well, high-level Pentagon officials, who are imposing fundamentalist Christianity on our soldiers.   The following excerpt is from a report by Truthout.org:

On the heels of a scathing report issued by the Defense Department’s inspector general that took high-level Pentagon officials to task for allowing an evangelical Christian organization unfettered access to the Department of Defense (DOD) to promote its fundamentalist agenda, comes word the Pentagon’s top chaplain opened its doors yet again to another evangelical group whose leader recently spent two days at the facility proselytizing, passing out Christian literature, and “saving souls.” . . .

According to documents obtained by the watchdog group the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and made available to Truthout, David Kistler, President of Hickory, North Carolina-based H.O.P.E. Ministries International, embarked on a “DC Crusade” along with dozens of members of the evangelical organization for two weeks that included two days inside the Pentagon proselytizing and preaching the “gospel” to government employees and “saving souls.”

Kistler is a somewhat controversial figure whose sermons contain apocalyptic messages and bizarre prophecies. He believes certain Democratic lawmakers will burn in hell while “good Christians,” such as President Bush, will be swept up into the heavens. The Rapture will soon vacuum up good Christians, including George W. Bush, to Heaven, he said in a past sermon to his congregation. Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton will not be Raptured up to Heaven. Following The Rapture, the Anti-Christ will appear and children will be “micro-chipped.”

Well, a little religion never hurt anyone, right?  Even while working at the Pentagon.  Maybe, then, it’s time to tell those dissenting soldiers to shut up worship Jesus Christ. (more…)

Governor Bill Richardson’s plan isn’t nuanced:

That means no airbases, no embedded soldiers training Iraqi forces, no troops in the Green Zone. Zero troops. I would leave the customary marine contingent at our Embassy, but if that became unsafe, then I’d bring them home too. Only then can the diplomatic process of reconciliation and reconstruction truly begin, and the US must lead the way in making it happen.

Some commentors on Huffpo objected, saying that it would take a long time to remove all those troops.  Another commentor responded:

I’m not a logistics expert, but how do 80,000+ fans leave the Rose Bowl, get in your gas guzzling SUV and drive. We only have 160,000? troops there. Airlift some equipment/personel from Baghdad then move the rest north toward NATO Turkey and south to Kuwait, with air support. The bigger risk to the troops is if they stay there. I don’t think you need 6 months to do that, maybe 6 days. I think most Iraqis would be thrilled to let us leave peacefully.

Richardson is one of the Democrats running for President.  Here is Richardson’s campaign site.

I’ve made no secret that I admire and trust Bill Moyers for his enlightened journalism.  Here is yet more evidence, an 8-minute video on the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

That is the opinion of Nir Rosen, independent journalist and the author of “In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq.”  In this interview with Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow.org Rosen comments that Iraq is still losing 50,000 people per month. 

Where are these refugees going?  To many other countries.

Syria is the most open and generous of all the countries in the region. They basically take anybody who comes in. And for a long time, they were giving them free healthcare, and they still provide free education. Well, they’ve been — they are being overburdened, as well, because the Syrian government subsidizes things such as bread. So every loaf of bread an Iraqi buys is actually being paid for in part by the Syrian government. As a result, they’re finding it more and more difficult to bear the cost.

The Jordanians basically closed their borders by the end of 2005, in part because they were being overburdened, and they also have demographic issues to worry about. Half of the small Jordanian population are Palestinian, and now you’ve introduced another million Iraqis. And this is a very fragile regime in the first place, the Jordanian dictatorship.

AMY GOODMAN: What does each country gain by letting in Iraqi refugees?

NIR ROSEN: Well, Jordan took in initially many of the wealthier ones, as did Egypt, and so they certainly gained a great deal of money and investment, and they required for residency a certain amount of money in the bank. But Jordan was a less friendly environment for Shias. Syria, again, is the most friendly environment for really any Iraqi; Shias, Sunnis, Christians each find welcoming neighborhoods there. Lebanon, very difficult to get to, and there’s a likelihood of being expelled by the Lebanese government, but Christian Iraqis have found that the Christians of Lebanon have been generous in protecting them. Shia Iraqis have tended to go into the Shia neighborhoods of Beirut. Egypt closed its borders more or less after about 150,000 Iraqis came in, mostly Sunni. The majority of the Iraqi Arab refugees are Sunnis, despite the fact that Sunnis are a minority in Iraq. And Sweden has taken in, I think, 40,000 or 50,000, as well. They’ve been quite generous. As you’ve said, we took in about 700, which is a laughable amount.

The interview eventually turned to Iran.  Why is the Bush administration obsessed about attacking Iran?

NIR ROSEN: Well, I think we’re dealing with a mentality on the part of our administration that nobody else is going to have the guts to take on Iran in the future, the next president, so if we don’t do it, who’s going to do it, and we’ll be vindicated in the future just like Reagan was vindicated, allegedly, for bringing down the Soviet Union. So they have this long-term view of how history will treat them, and if they don’t take down Iran, nobody else will, which is probably the case, although they can’t take down Iran, either.

Iran is not Iraq. You can bomb it, but I think you’d only basically strengthen the support for the government, as always happens when you bomb a country. We saw this in Yugoslavia and elsewhere. And they’ve been blaming Iran for everything under the sun lately, for supporting Sunni radicals in Iraq or attacking the Iranian-backed leadership in Iraq, for attacking — and then they blame Iran for supporting the Taliban, who, of course, were bitter enemies of Iran. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

If you somehow haven’t yet figured out how the incessant lies of FOX led us to begin the senseless bloody occupation of Iraq, you can catch it all again. Except it’s about Iran now. This video comparing the FOX campaigns against Iraq and Iran is almost unbelievable. Is there anyone really willing to believe such disinformation a second time around? But we’re in full swing and there’s no powerful media voice blowing the whistle.

Here is a Yahoo.com story on this video comparison.

Amy Goodman had this to say about the run-up to the invasion of Iraq:

FAIR did a a study. In the week leading up to General Colin Powell going to the security council to make his case for the invasion and the week afterwards, this was the period where more than half of the people in this country were opposed to an invasion. They did a study of CBS evening news, NBC nightly news, ABC evening news and the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. The four major newscasts. Two weeks. 393 interviews on war. 3 were anti-war voices. 3 of almost 400 and that included PBS. This has to be changed. It has to be challenged.

The question is whether enough people running mainstream media care enough to vigorously contest the current round of lies regarding Iran.

In this startling video, Cheney concludes that getting Saddam Hussein wouldn’t have been worth many American lives.

He is speaking fluidly and confidently, like an unpatriotic liberal, throughout the video.

This short video is from an antiwar protest covered by the Jackson Hole Planet online.

Poet Sharon Olds has declined to attend the National Book Festival in Washington D.C. who won a National Book Critics Circle Award and who is professor of creative writing at New York University, was invited along with a number of other writers by First Lady Laura Bush.

Here’s her letter of explanation to Mrs. Bush, published by The Nation.

Football hero Pat Tillman died a military hero, defending the U.S from terrorism, right?  How convenient.  Or did he die of friendly fire?  It depends on what official version of the story you care to believe.  Tillman’s story reeks of cover-up. 

Now take a look at this evidence.

And now take a look at this interpretation suggesting that Tillman was murdered because he planned to return to the U.S. to speak out again the Iraq occupation.  And then look at this article from SFGate.com.  Here’s an excerpt:

[Tillman] started keeping a journal at 16 and continued the practice on the battlefield, writing in it regularly. (His journal was lost immediately after his death.) [Pat's mother] Mary Tillman said a friend of Pat’s even arranged a private meeting with Chomsky, the antiwar author, to take place after his return from Afghanistan — a meeting prevented by his death. She said that although he supported the Afghan war, believing it justified by the Sept. 11 attacks, “Pat was very critical of the whole Iraq war.”

After standing in line at the post office for longer than I should have had to, I finally got to the front of the line and realized the flap of one of the envelopes I wanted to mail was not sticking, so I asked the clerk for a small piece of tape. (I was only standing in line because I didn’t know the postage because they have raised their rates so many times I lost track of what it costs to mail something.)

Anyway, in response to my request for a small piece of tape, and despite the fact that she had a HUGE ROLL OF TAPE inches from her left elbow, the postal clerk said the United States Postal Service has a new policy which is that because they SELL tape they no longer GIVE IT AWAY.

I told the clerk I cannot understand how come MY government can afford to spend billions for the people of a country like Iraq, none of whose citizens I ever met or expect to meet in this lifetime*, but cannot afford to give me - a taxpayer and, by the way, a damn good and long-time postal service CUSTOMER - one little piece of scotch tape.

*BTW, I don’t expect to meet anybody from Iraq in either this lifetime or the hereafter because I think they have a different Heaven than we have. OK, I feel better now, but I’m still miffed.

The title to this post is from a bumper sticker shown in “Generation Chickenhawk,” a video shot last week by Max Blumenthal. The scene?  The College Republican National Convention in Washington D.C.

Here’s proof that our young Republicans love wars as long as others do the fighting. 

Blumental’s ten-minute video is well worth watching if you’re looking for unassailable evidence that neocons are actually members of the political equivalent of a fundamentalist religion.  Interesting to see that Tom Delay still has a willing audience.

In his blog at Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald describes the core mentality of those who remain pro-war:

We need to prove to the world how powerful and tough and strong we are by kicking ass and starting wars and putting our boots on the ground and getting our hands dirty and bombing and invading and fighting like the Real Warriors we are because Civilization is at Risk. And the way we should do that is by sending those people — the ones way, way over there — to go and fight and risk their lives in the wars I love.

More than ever, Iraq remains a battle over hearts and minds.   The site of the battle is not only Iraq, however.  The battle is being fought right here in the U.S., with the corporate media serving as an ally to those who prefer the status quo.   The status quo is the inevitable result of the lack of information regarding the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

NPR recently interviewed psychologist Elliot Aronson, co-author, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me).   Aronson worked closely with Leon Festinger back in the 1950’s “designing experiments to test and expand dissonance theory.”  Here is NPR’s plug for the interview:

We all have a hard time admitting that we’re wrong, but according to a new book about human psychology, it’s not entirely our fault. Social psychologist Elliot Aronson says our brains work hard to make us think we are doing the right thing, even in the face of sometimes overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

I listened closely to the interview (you can listen on-line too by visiting the above link) because this was yet another serious attempt to apply psychology to a critical real-life situations.   Exhibit A during this interview was the President’s dysfunctional attitude toward to continued U.S. occupation of Iraq.  

According to Aronson, cognitive dissonance “is a drive, like hunger or thirst.”  It is directed toward the human need to define who we are in a good light in order to reduce dissonance, so that we can “sleep well at night.”  It is “a powerful and unconscious motor” that smoothes out our mental “rough edges.” 

We commonly refer to cognitive dissonance as “justification.” Regarding many simple mistakes, it’s no big deal to spin the incident in a way that deflects blame and embarrassment from one’s self.  If you spill wine on the carpet, you justify that that it was only white wine, or that the damage wasn’t noticeable, rather than thinking about the toxic (my word) thought that you were clumsy to spill the wine. Aronson warns that when we make serious mistakes, reducing dissonance “keeps us from learning from our mistakes.”   It makes us do the same mistake over and over again.

In the case of Iraq, cognitive dissonance invites neocons to convince themselves that that it was a good decision; those who have invested heavily in defending the invasion are thus likely to repeatedly come up with new justifications for invading.  Aronson goes so far as to state that President Bush engages in his specious justifications to allow himself “to sleep well at night.”  When cognitive dissonance is at work, ambiguous CIA reports filtered.  “You only pay attention to the helpful information.”  I would think that those people who have spent the most energy defending the President’s decision, thereby antagonizing their friends and family, would (because of cognitive dissonance) be those who are remain among the 20% of this country who still support the U.S. invasion.  They are the same people, I would surmise, most likely to claim that the U.S. is in Iraq “because of Al Qaida.”

Research shows that if a high investment is required to achieve something, cognitive dissonance will come into play, causing us to reach for justifications (even wild justifications) to paint ourselves in a good light.  Aronson discussed one experiment where those subjects who had to go through a severe initiation later claimed that that a boring group was worthwhile (compared to subjects who didn’t have to go through a strenuous initiation, who rated the group as boring and not worthwhile).  The bottom line?  It is too hard to justify doing a lot of work to get into a boring group.   The solution is to re-evaluate the group as worthwhile. That is cognitive dissonance in action.

What is the best solution to the damage often inflicted by cognitive dissonance?  (more…)

Members of the U.S. military are now speaking up, as documented by DemocracyNow.  This set of interviews by DemocracyNow was provoked by a recent article by The Nation.  Here’s how DemocracyNow describes that article, entitled “The Other War: Iraq Vets Bear Witness”:

The Nation has published a startling new expose of fifty American combat veterans of the Iraq War who give vivid on-the-record accounts of the US military occupation in Iraq and describe a brutal side of the war rarely seen on television screens or chronicled in newspaper accounts. The investigation marks the first time so many on-the-record, named eyewitnesses from within the US military have been assembled in one place to openly corroborate assertions of indiscriminate killings and other atrocities by the US military in Iraq.

Here is an excerpt from interviews conducted by Amy Goodman:

AMY GOODMAN: The number of raids you were involved with?

SGT. JOHN BRUHNS: The number of raids I was involved with, I estimate probably about a thousand. What we would do — how these raids would occur and why we would go on the raids is this: let’s say there’s a roadside bomb, an IED goes off in our sector one day, and then the next day there’s an RPG attack, and then the day after there are some sporadic gunfire at US troops. Well, a battalion commander reasonably would call a mission, and he would say, “You know, let’s go into the sector. We’ll quarantine it, and we won’t let anybody in or out. And we’ll send the infantry in, and we’ll do cordons and searches,” which are raids, “and we’ll go house to house, and we’ll look for weapons, we’ll look for bomb-making material, we’ll look for anti-US propaganda, any intelligence at all that would lead to the insurgency.”

So you go there in the middle of the night, and you want to catch them — you want to catch the Iraqis off guard. So you enter the house fast and furious. You kick down the door, and you run upstairs, and you get the man of the house and you get him out of bed, and his wife is laying next to him. It’s Baghdad, it’s July, it’s August. His wife sometimes may be exposed, because of her night garments in the middle of the night, which is humiliating for that woman and for that man and for that family. And you separate the man from his wife, and if he has children, you put his family in a room, and, you know, you put two soldiers on the door, outside the door, to make sure that his family stays in that room. And then you get — we had interpreters, so we would take interpreters with us throughout the house. And we would have the man of the house, and we would interrogate him over and over again. “Who are the insurgents? Do you know who they are? Are you with them?” And, you know, basically we would tear his house apart. We would, you know, take his bed, turn that upside-down, dump his closets, his drawers, if he had them. I mean, just anything.

And I would say eight out of ten times we never really found any intelligence at all within these homes that would lead us to believe that these people were members of the insurgency. What they were was just Iraqis in their own communities. And we came in there, and we came in uninvited. And I believe — and I don’t blame this on the US military at all. I don’t. I blame this on George Bush. But when you’re involved in a military operation like that, you enter these homes as if you’re going after the enemy, as if you’re going after bin Laden himself, when, for the most part, they’re just families living in their homes, trying to get a night’s rest before they get up and go to work in the morning, if there is work for them. And it’s just — I believe that this created a lot of resentment among the Iraqi people, causing them to join a resistance movement against US and coalition forces in Iraq.

Here another excerpt from the article published by The Nation:

Many of these veterans returned home deeply disturbed by the disparity between the reality of the war and the way it is portrayed by the US government and American media. The war the vets described is a dark and even depraved enterprise, one that bears a powerful resemblance to other misguided and brutal colonial wars and occupations, from the French occupation of Algeria to the American war in Vietnam and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.

“I’ll tell you the point where I really turned,” said Spc. Michael Harmon, 24, a medic from Brooklyn. He served a thirteen-month tour beginning in April 2003 with the 167th Armor Regiment, Fourth Infantry Division, in Al-Rashidiya, a small town near Baghdad. “I go out to the scene and [there was] this little, you know, pudgy little 2-year-old child with the cute little pudgy legs, and I look and she has a bullet through her leg…. An IED [improvised explosive device] went off, the gun-happy soldiers just started shooting anywhere and the baby got hit. And this baby looked at me, wasn’t crying, wasn’t anything, it just looked at me like–I know she couldn’t speak. It might sound crazy, but she was like asking me why. You know, Why do I have a bullet in my leg?… I was just like, This is–this is it. This is ridiculous.”

It is, indeed, time, according to Chris Hedges writing at Truthdig.com:

Israel is currently lobbying the United States to launch aerial strikes on Iran, despite the debacle in Lebanon.  Israel’s iron determination to forcibly prevent a nuclear Iran makes it probable that before the end of the Bush administration an attack on Iran will take place.  The efforts to halt nuclear development through diplomatic means have failed.  It does not matter that Iran poses no threat to the United States.  It does not matter that it does not even pose a threat to Israel, which has several hundred nuclear weapons in its arsenal.  It matters only that Israel demands total military domination of the Middle East. 

The alliance between Israel and the United States has culminated after 50 years in direct U.S. military involvement in the Middle East.  This involvement, which is not furthering American interests, is unleashing a geopolitical nightmare.  American soldiers and Marines are dying in droves in a useless war.  The impotence of the United States in the face of Israeli pressure is complete.  The White House and the Congress have become, for perhaps the first time, a direct extension of Israeli interests.  There is no longer any debate within the United States.  This is evidenced by the obsequious nods to Israel by all the current presidential candidates with the exception of Dennis Kucinich.  The political cost for those who challenge Israel is too high. 

This means there will be no peaceful resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.  It means the incidents of Islamic terrorism against the U.S. and Israel will grow.  It means that American power and prestige are on a steep, irreversible decline.  And I fear it also means the ultimate end of the Jewish experiment in the Middle East. 

Who is Chris Hedges? He is currently

A senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University, (more…)