People converting to the winning side...

[Bill Stewart]

At 12:06 AM 04/12/2003 -0700, Tim May wrote:
>I'm not surprised to see some of my friends and associates (not 
>necessarily on this list...I actually do interact with people off-list) 
>switching sides from being "anti-war" to the other side. They natter about 
>how Saddam was a tyrant (true enough, and there are a hundred other such 
>tyrants), to how he must have had the magical word WMD (no evidence so 
>far, and he certainly didn't use them when he should have), and how this 
>will prove to the A-rabs that America stands tall (debatable).

My neighbor has been flying a flag on our shared balcony for a couple of 
years (aargh...)  He's a retired pilot, who when he was young was in the 
Navy; his job was to fly bombers off aircraft carriers and drop nukes on 
targets, which he said he wouldn't do now.  When the war started, I asked 
him to take it down.  He agreed to take it down in a week, unless there 
were WMDs used in the US, but that it was expressing his concern for the 
soldiers over there, and also told me that his wife was strongly against 
the war, and what he'd done in the Navy.  A couple days later the flag was 
down, and he'd said that he'd decided that Bush was lying about all this 
WMD stuff.

...
>As Chomsky notes, the Big Lie has been hinted at in such a way that more 
>than half the sheeple in the U.S. are now convinced that Saddam Hussein 
>was behind 9/11.
>(This whole episode ought to be a major new chapter in "Manufacturing 
>Consent.")

Yup.

On the other hand, at least from what's in the news,
the number of Iraqis killed in this war has been pretty low
(www.iraqbodycount.org estimates 1100-1400),
which is probably pretty close to the number of people killed
by dictatorships and other evil governments that the US is supporting,
and it's only 4-5 times the number of people Bush had killed as governor of 
Texas.
More to the point, it's less than the average death rate that the
UN estimates has been caused by the destruction of the water supplies
in the last war and subsequent embargo (about 100K/year.)
So if getting rid of Saddam leads the US to rebuilding Iraq for PR reasons,
or at least gets rid of the embargo and lets the Iraqis rebuild,
things may get better.  (On the other hand, after the war's over,
we'll probably find that there were a lot more deaths,
mainly in bombed buildings.)