(Cont. from Part 1) As an illustration, Lifton quotes the mother of a soldier killed in action in Iraq: "My son's death was senseless. Whatever the leadership of our country said we'd find, they've not come up with."
This is also a good illustration of why the reasons for war matter. The Iraq War was preceded by a year of propaganda preparation by the Bush Administration based on the urgent threat to America represented by Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction," bolstered by the continuous implied association of Iraq to the 9/11 attacks, with the inevitable claim added that the enemy was horrible to his own people.
Only the latter of these three claims has proven to be true. If even a substantial fraction of the anthrax and other chemical and biological weapons we were told we had to fear in Iraq had been found, then more of the public could most likely sustain a prowar "survivor mission" for a longer period of time.
But what has happened is, "For many, it is increasingly difficult to stifle the feeling that these deaths were needless sacrifices in a misguided war. Indeed, Americans are experiencing what can be called a conflict of interpretation."
And Lifton reminds us that the feelings behind these competing interpretations "are primal, involving as they do a sense of responsibility to the dead."
Because of those primal feelings, we might add, Republicans who like to think of themselves as open-minded and tolerant find themselves condemning war critics as unpatriotic or worse. Democrats who actually feel more comfortable being the sort of liberal who's so open-minded they're unwilling to back their own side in an argument find themselves throwing prowar arguments back in the faces of their advocates with little patience for the endlessly shifting justifications for the war.
And, in the end, whenever the United States finally withdraws from Iraq, both war fans and war critics will be left with long-lasting resentments and distrusts of each other.
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