Fellow Dopers, I recall a year ago reading all of the threads here on the SDMB regarding the impending War in Iraq. I recall the passionate arguements both for and against the invasion. Most importantly, I can recall the remarkably knowledgeable people who were posting - and they could name all of the players - Imams, Iraqi Leaders, major resistance movements etc etc. The knowledge base was really impressive.
However, here we are a year later and Iraq is a horrible place to be by all accounts. Law and Order is a hit and miss affair from what I can tell, and the borders are leaking like crazy with people moving into and out of the country.
36 hours ago some horrible bomb blasts took place in Karbala and Baghdad which killed 186 people and probably maimed another 800 or so people. Dreadful stuff. And yet I see very little comment upon it here on the SDMB.
Have we become so desensitised to all things “Iraq” now that we would prefer not to hear about it anymore, so that we can go through life in some form of normalcy?
Is it apathy on our parts, or sheer weariness and emotional exhaustion?
And is there a danger that by taking our eyes off Iraq that it might escalate out of control in some way? Perhaps a civil war? Perhaps a massive escalation of hostilities between neighbouring states?
Or worst of all, is it something just too plain ugly to admit - namely, we kinda don’t care because it was only Iraqi’s who were killed, and not our fellow countrymen? I’d hate to find out the latter is the general consensus.
I think you’re correct, although I disagree with how you put this.
It’s not that we “don’t care” about that region of the world. We’re STILL arguing about it. But we’re arguing over the US role in Iraq, not Iraq itself (generally). And that’s because that’s what we care about.
Look, if you’re a reasonably well-informed person, if you pay attention to current events, and have for a substantial portion of your life, and have learned about the history of our species, you’ll realize that humanity is, in the aggregate, a pile of shit.
And news like this bomb blast blends into other horrors that have been inflicted on, and by, humankind, recently and throughout history. Just today, 28 coal miners were killed in an explosion in China. Haiti is in chaos, and its former dictator, “Baby Doc” Duvalier, has asked for a diplomatic passport and is itching for a comeback. (He was the one whose supporters regularly hacked apart political opponents with machetes. He’s been living in exile in the south of France since 1986.) In Belgium, a former electrician on trial admits he did kidnap and rape little girls, but denied killing them–including the two dead 8-year-olds found in a dungeon in his house. He blames his ex-wife for not feeding them while he was in prison.
(All of those were from a five-minute perusal of cnn.com.)
In other words, we’re hearing nothing but noise, and if we pause to listen too long . . . well, that way madness lies.
So we redact our worldview to something we can handle. That’s why we haven’t really discussed this event, in my opinion. We’re not desensitized, we just don’t have much to say about it.
The U.S. killed thousands of Iraqi civilians in the process of conquering the country, and generally speaking it was a minor news story at most and forgotten almost as soon as the main part of the war ended. There’s no desensitization if you ain’t sensitive to the issue to begin with.
Shouldn’t we ask the same question every time a busload full of Israelis is blown up?
Unfortunately, the middle east is full of this stuff. This is a bunch of islamic fanatical terrorists blowing up fellow muslims to advance a fascistic cause.
But if you’d like to talk about desensitization to violence, why don’t we start with the collective yawn offered when Saddam gassed the Kurds? Or when he killed thousands of Shia after the first Gulf war? Or when he drained the marshes and starved the children of the Marsh Arabs in a massive ethnic cleansing?
And while we’re at it, why don’t we discuss our apparent desensitization to the incredible human horror of North Korea? The labor camps, the mass slaughters, the political killings?
For that matter, how about the EIGHT HUNDRED THOUSAND Tutsis that were slaughtered in Rwanda, hacked apart with machetes, while the Clinton administration refused U.N. pleas to send peacekeepers to halt the genocide? How many Americans even knew that happened?
Why are you focusing on one terrorist attack in Iraq? It’s tragic. There will be more of them. But there will be no people stuffed into wood chippers. No children in political jails. No more mass graves. No families buried alive.
Saddam killed over a million people during his reign, and pershaps 500,000 in the last ten years. That’s fifty thousand people a year. If the total dead from the U.S. attack is 5,000 people, that’s 45,000 who are alive today becausse Saddam is gone. Does that count for anything?
The keen observer will be aware that I started a thread in the Pit asking this very question - namely, why it wasn’t worthy of comment. I was advised to start a thread here in GD asking this very question instead of implying no-one on the SDMB cared. Ergo, the presence of this thread.
Readers who looked into the earlier BBQ Pit version will be aware that I mentioned most of the points you noted above Sam. I chose not to mention them a 2nd time specifically to explore my question relating to how desensitisation works. Or for that matter, whether we here in the West are innately insular.
In my defence, however, last time I checked I’m allowed to start a thread on whatever I’d like so long as it meets the rules. And it’s worth noting I have 1,400 odd posts here - at least half of which over the last 2 years have pertained to most of the subjects you mentioned above. I’d like to think I cover a lot of ground here at the SDMB. In this instance, the total lack of comment interested me.
In particular, I’m interested in the theories behind the machinations which are at play.
The way I saw it on some news channel or other, and I’m not making this up, I swear: “Iraqis Killing Iraqis.”
So yeah, I’d say that the Sunnis, or whoever committed this mass murder, has learned that as long as you don’t kill Americans, you won’t get the Army, the Air Force, and the Marines all looking to incinerate you, your relatives, and your dogs.
A few months ago I came to the conclusion that Iraq was headed for civil war, and that as long as that war starts after the November elections here in the US are over, no one will give a damn.
I’ve seen nothing to dissuade me from that view.
I was thinking about that massacre this afternoon, and the one thing that I had running through my head again and again is the American experience of having 341 Marines blown up in Lebanon just over two decades ago. I have no idea why, but I draw a connection between the two events, wondering if this might be something that affects the Iraqi psyche at such a dangerous time?
I think it is natural to care about fellow Americans first, and it is hard to defend the lackadasical attitude toward so many tragedies around the world. But I think we ought to be more concerned about what it happening to Iraqis now, because they seem to be the number one target of terrorism right now. (Funny how the “war on terror” is only really compelling to a large part of the population when it is American lives at risk… never mind the folks who quite literally surround our troops at the moment.)
I think the Pentagon should really start doing a better job of tracking Iraqi casualties. They are supposed to be our friends now, and I think only positive results would come if the military actually levelled with the public about how many Iraqis have died during this war. Perhaps people would start caring more about the plight of so many Iraqis after their so-called liberation.
SS:Saddam killed over a million people during his reign, and pershaps 500,000 in the last ten years. That’s fifty thousand people a year. If the total dead from the U.S. attack is 5,000 people, that’s 45,000 who are alive today becausse Saddam is gone. Does that count for anything?
Nobody is trying to claim that Hussein’s regime was anything but a repressive brutal disaster for Iraq, but this argument is playing fast and loose with the statistics.
For one thing, the majority of Saddam’s killings occurred before the first Gulf War, when the US was supportive of or at best neutral towards his actions. For another, the majority of his killings since that time took place in massacres directed at specific groups, such as the slaughter of Kurds following that war.
Moreover, I can’t find any evidence that the number of people he killed in the period 1994–2003 is anything like 500,000. In particular, the 2002 US Human Rights Report on Iraq (par. 7) says that since 1997, there have been “as many as 3000” arbitrary executions by his regime. If we double that number to account for “disappearances” and other extrajudicial killings, that still puts the annual number of victims of the regime in the past decade on the order of 1000 rather than 50,000.
Seems to me that you can get the “500,000 in the past ten years” figure only by factoring in the estimated Iraqi deaths due to disease and malnutrition resulting from the international sanctions policy. Not the same thing.
So it is simply not justifiable, as far as I can see, to try to imply that Saddam was killing an average of 50,000 people per year and that without the US/UK invasion he would have gone on killing that many people annually. Like I said, his crimes were indeed atrocious and inexcusable, but you shouldn’t manipulate statistics to give the false appearance that those crimes somehow make the death toll from the war comparatively benign or insignificant.
The number estimates have been going up dramatically in the last year due to the number of mass graves being discovered in Iraq. I will grant you that the 500,000 figure may be high - It’s very hard to get a solid number for the dead given the closed nature of Saddam’s regime.
Let’s get back to the OP, and try to leave the politics out of it (myself included). Because it’s an interesting question. Why do we care so much about some human rights abuses, and tend to ignore others? The best example of that would be the slaughter of the Tutsis, which went almost completely under the radar for most people. North Korea has been killing millions of its own people, and no one cares. But sometimes the death of a single person or a small group sends shockwaves through the world. Why?
Some possible answers: Racism (deaths in Africa just don’t resonate in the west). Political opportunism (some human rights abuses are seen as good tools for advancing a political cause and become symbolic and heavily promoted). Access to media (would the Tiananmen square massacre have sunk into our collective consciousness were it not for that shocking picture of the student with his handbag standing in front of that tank?)
As for specifics of the bombing in Iraq, I’m going to resurrect another thread to talk about it.
The number estimates have been going up dramatically in the last year due to the number of mass graves being discovered in Iraq. I will grant you that the 500,000 figure may be high - It’s very hard to get a solid number for the dead given the closed nature of Saddam’s regime.
Let’s get back to the OP, and try to leave the politics out of it (myself included). Because it’s an interesting question. Why do we care so much about some human rights abuses, and tend to ignore others? The best example of that would be the slaughter of the Tutsis, which went almost completely under the radar for most people. North Korea has been killing millions of its own people, and no one cares. But sometimes the death of a single person or a small group sends shockwaves through the world. Why?
Some possible answers: Racism (deaths in Africa just don’t resonate in the west). Political opportunism (some human rights abuses are seen as good tools for advancing a political cause and become symbolic and heavily promoted). Access to media (would the Tiananmen square massacre have sunk into our collective consciousness were it not for that shocking picture of the student with his handbag standing in front of that tank?)
As for specifics of the bombing in Iraq, I’m going to resurrect another thread to talk about it.
Sadly, the OP omitted “contempt” from his list of choices. I guess he’ll have to put you in the “apathy” column.
Meanwhile, I’ve got a pet theory about this paucity of Iraq-related threads. As Airblairxxx has so excellently suggested, many of us get through the day by redacting history as it unfolds. Heck, concerning our occupation of Iraq, I think a lot of it is already redacted for us. And further, some of us are just content to settle back in the crapulence of the foetid little nuggets we’re fed; witness the resiliency of the fabled “people shredders,” a yarn as deliciously macabre as it is difficult to substantiate.
This quietude on the Boards comes from all that stuff, sure, but there is something at play that’s more vexing than them all: Compassion.
You said it yourself, Boo Boo Foo, there were remarkably knowledgeable people posting before the war. These same people are still here, as is the knowledge base, only now the war’s over and we’re still losing one soldier per day. Plus God knows how many innocent Iraqi civilians. We started a war and we loused up the occupation and this terrible shit’s coming at us on a daily – if not hourly – basis. How many times will the Bush-backers hear they’re wrong before they just simply stop logging on?
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At the risk of making myself sound very callous indeed, I felt basically the same thing about the Baghdad bombings that I did about September 11th, which is to say, little.
I consider people in New York to be as effectively distant as people in Baghdad, or Tokyo, or Canberra…
But that raises an interesting point. Most Americans most certainly did’t feel little. As a matter of fact, I’d say 9/11 was the first time Americans were forced to face that kind of attack and it’s aftermath up close and personal.
Which makes me wonder? Is the problem not that we’re de-sensitized to all the violence, but perhaps that we’re not sensitized enough to be motivated to do anything about it?
Loss of life on such a scale is always to be regretted. However, any tears are surely crocodilian if we do not ask "how might such deaths be prevented in future?"
Who in the heck is doing the bombing??Sam neatly shoehorns them into a catch-all “Islamic fundamentalists”, but bombings such as these were curiously notable by their absence in Iraq before the invasion. Have these terrorists suddenly come out to play after building bombs in their garages for 20 years?
The possibilty must be confronted: They were ordered by Saddam to carry out so many terrorist bombings and attacks that civil war loomed like a stormcloud on the horizon. When the US hands over power to a toothless talking-shop and withdraws, and all hell breaks loose, with bombings and murder on a horrific scale, who is in position to take control again?
Congratulations–you win the “sees the obvious truth” prize. Americans, by and large, simply do not care if a bunch of foreigners kill another bunch of foreigners in a foreign country (unless Isrealis are involved on one side or the other–and even then that response has gotten much weaker).
If the suffering of the North Koreans can’t even get a ten-second mention on the news, a couple hundred dead Iraqis will hardly rouse the self-appointed moral guardians of America (left wing or right wing) from their masturbatory torpor.
Incidentally, one noted source guesses that the bombings “were undertaken by “Salafi” Sunni jihadists, [and] can tip Iraq into civil war”, and notes widepsread (if erroneous) sentiment that the Americans were somehow responsible.
Oh, I see. Well, it is obviously wrong and obviously understandable. Anti-American sentiments run high. It was interesting to watch the US forces arriving at the scene and being pelted with stones and having to retreat. OTOH the American people and government are also full of erroneous conceptions. . . that’s what started the war in the first place.
I was also shocked by footage of an ambulance carrying injured people and the driver is pulled out of the vehicle and shot by Iraqi police. I could not watch it a second time. Very disturbing.
Iraq is sinking into chaos and civil war and the US occupation forces are making it their priority to protect themselves rather than the Iraqi population so it just makes it easier for anarchy to spread.