WaPo editorial: Disagree About Iraq? You're Not Just Wrong -- You're Evil.

[babylonsister]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/11/AR2007031101439.html

Disagree About Iraq? You're Not Just Wrong -- You're Evil.

By Shankar Vedantam
Monday, March 12, 2007; Page A03

The conviction of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby last week gave Americans a chance to pick at the scab of what has become a favored obsession -- the debate over the motives of the Bush administration in the run-up to the war in Iraq.

The contours of that debate are straightforward. Opponents of the war believe passionately that President Bush, his neoconservative allies and a complicit Congress deliberately misled the nation into war. Supporters of the president and the war concede that mistakes were made, especially on the question of whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but say this involved no attempt to hoodwink the nation.

Antiwar groups declared that the Libby trial laid bare the Bush administration's smear campaign to discredit a war critic -- and said they hope Libby is just the first in a long line of officials to be punished. Supporters of the administration and the war declared the trial showed that Bush had done nothing to mislead the nation and that war opponents are being paranoid.

What is interesting about the clash from a psychological perspective is not that supporters and critics disagree, but that large numbers of people on both sides claim to know the motives of people who disagree with them. When was the last time you heard people say that those who disagree with them on the Iraq war are well-meaning, smart, informed and thoughtful?

A wide body of psychological research shows that on any number of hot-button issues, people seem hard-wired to believe the worst about those who disagree with them. Most people can see the humor in such behavior when it doesn't involve things they care about: If you don't care about sports, for example, you roll your eyes when fans of one team question the principles and parentage of fans of a rival team.

"We are really bad about putting ourselves in other people's places and looking at the world the way they look at it," said Glenn D. Reeder, a social psychologist at Illinois State University who recently conducted a study into how supporters and critics of the Iraq war have come to believe entirely different narratives about the war -- and about each other. "We find it difficult to grant that other people come to their conclusions in good faith if they reach a conclusion that is different than ours," he said.

more...

[rfranklin]

1. Geez, there is a well-documented tale of malfeasance on the part of...

Cheney and Bush on the fudged intelligence as well as the planning to invade Iraq long before 9/11. How can we impugn their "integrity?"

[razors edge]

2. Psychobabble.

Bush attacked and killed innocent Iraqis with forethought and malice, premeditated by definition.

He is more familiar than most with the results of such a conviction of these charges in a court of his own state.

He has shown the resolve and intestinal fortitude, to hold one, convicted by twelve to the ultimate penalty.

Yet, as one convicted by millions in the court of the world opinion, that intestinal fortitude to see justice done seems to have failed him, how can that be?

Shouldn't a man with such morale conviction insist the punishment described by law be carried out regardless of political or financial standing?

If bush believes he is innocent should he not surrender himself for the courts to decide? Or does he only trust other's fate on the judiciousness of the state?

Simple logic that will never be published by the Washington Post, or any other paper for that matter.

[kenny blankenship]

3. I think people can disagree about what to do about Iraq

about what we should do now, whether getting out or staying in--and have equally good intentions behind their different ideas.

I don't think people can disagree however about the immoral character of how we got into Iraq nor about the immoral character of those political leaders who dragged us there to the scene of their crimes. Bush and his administration lied to start a war--deliberately and massively. The Libby trial has nothing to do with establishing the factuality of that--that fraudulent march to war was proven conclusively by a swarm of external facts not involved in Libby-Plamegate.

The Iraq War was not a simple breach of etiquette, or bad manners, or questionable ethics, it was seriously illegal behavior. It is an offense we have compounded by every day we remain in Iraq. A conspiracy to start a war of aggression is a war crime according to laws we considered settled by WWII, and it is a violation of the most solemnly undertaken treaty obligations on our books: the UN Charter, which we drafted and ratified.

I'm not going to listen to people defend the premises of the war and defend the people who got us into it--I don't have to. It was a crime. It still is a crime and those people who did it are mass murderers running around loose.