Friday, March 14, 2003

Notelets for 2003/03/14 #

I had a feeling of being understood by Hendrik Hertzberg in his latest New Yorker column when my eyes landed on the following paragraph: Not everyone is so sure. Both among those who, on balance, support the coming war and among those who, on balance, oppose it are a great many who hold their views in fear and trembling, haunted by the suspicion that the other side might be right after all. In the American "homeland," the anxiety that this crisis is provoking is physical (a dread that, for obvious reasons, is perhaps stronger in New York and Washington than elsewhere), but it is also intellectual. The divisions are profound, and the most agonizing are not between people but within them. [emphasis mine] The phenomenon is visible in the tabular abstractions of opinion surveys. According to one fairly typical recent poll, conducted for the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes, only a bare majority of the public favors the United Nations' authorizing an invasion as opposed to a "strengthened inspection process." But much larger--and therefore substantially overlapping--majorities, usually in the seventy-per-cent range, say that they are convinced by the mutually exclusive arguments of both sides. They agree that the United States should not invade Iraq without the approval of the United Nations, and also that the U.N.'s disapproval must not be allowed to stand in the way; that Iraqi intransigence is such that the United States now has no choice but to invade, and also that strengthened inspections are preferable to invasion; that an invasion should begin soon, because Iraq's weapons of mass destruction will otherwise only become stronger, and also that an invasion should not begin at all, because it would provoke Saddam to use those weapons. When people have no idea of the consequences of a given course of action or inaction, they don't know which way to turn--or they turn both ways. *     Posted by Raymond Yee on 3/14/03; 3:33:38 PM from the Personal Notes dept. Discuss