In my daily blog roll, I try to sample sites from the left and the right (though I clearly tend to spend more time on the right/conservative side of the blogosphere. As has been discussed in my recent posts and in the comments, there is a clear tendency on both sides to set up straw man arguments, impute them to the other side, and skewer them. Usually, this ends up making the poster look like a mirror image of the fantasies he is attacking. I would like to do something different today. Glenn Greenwald is osmeone whose blog I read from time to time. He often writes passionatley and entertainingly, but when he criticizes his opponents, he tends to go overboard. Rather than "Fisk" a post by self-described liberal Glenn Greenwald, I would like to take a slightly different tack.
Yesterday, Glenn purported to explore the Anatomy of the "thought" process of Bush defenders:
As much as anything else, Bush defenders are characterized by an increasingly absolutist refusal to recognize any facts which conflict with their political desires, and conversely, by a borderline-religious embrace of any assertions which bolster those desires. It's a world-view which conflates desire with reality, disregards all facts and evidence that conflict with the decreed beliefs, and faithfully embraces any assertions and fantasies, no matter how baseless and flagrantly false, provided that they bolster the mythology.
Fair enough and worth considering; people with deeply felt political positions tend to filter the news and accept the data that confirms their preconceived notions. That is not a new finding and it has been confirmed by Experimental Psychologists as well as in the more narrow confines of the Psychoanalytic setting. Unfortunately, since this tends to operate on an unconscious level, we often do not recognize when we do the same thing.
Glenn Greenwald suggests what he sees as some of the core positions of the "Bush defenders":
Thus, things are going really great in Iraq - just as we predicted they would. When we invaded, Saddam had WMD's and he was funding Al Qaeda. Oil revenues will pay for the whole thing, we will be welcomed as liberators, the whole war will be won quickly and easily. A large military presence is unnecessary because there is no insurgency. Bush is a popular and beloved President. All but a handful of radical fringe subversives in America support the war and believe terrorism is the overarching problem. Americans want to militarily confront Iran, want illegal warrantless eavesdropping, and are happy with how the country is being governed.
It is pretty obvious from this description, which doesn't match the views of any Conservative I have read, that Glenn Greenwald imagines "Bush defenders" to be thoroughly out of touch with reality. He could have written a critical piece in this way instead:
Thus, things are going really great in Iraq - just as we predicted they would. Thus, things are continuing to be confused and problematic in Iraq. Bush defenders are optimistic that with a new government in Iraq will become a stable democracy at some point; I think it will fall back into anarchy and chaos.
When we invaded, Saddam had WMD's and he was funding Al Qaeda. We never found stockpiles of WMD and the Bush administration obviously was wrong about that; his defenders believe he had an active program ready to be fully reimplemented just as soon as the sanctions were lifted. I don't agree; his WMD programs were dead and were well past revivification.
Oil revenues will pay for the whole thing, we will be welcomed as liberators, the whole war will be won quickly and easily. The Bush people oversold the war; it has been much harder than expected; while many Iraqis greeted our troops as liberators, too many hated us from the start.
A large military presence is unnecessary because there is no insurgency. Bush should have had more troops in Iraq from the start; a larger force would have stopped the insurgency from getting off the ground.
Bush is a popular and beloved President. Bush's popularity is plummeting even though many of his defenders insist the numbers are exaggerated by the polling techniques used; still, they cannot deny the trend.
And the conclusion:
All but a handful of radical fringe subversives in America support the war and believe terrorism is the overarching problem. Americans are becoming tired and dispirited by the war, which the news continually shows as a disaster, though many of the milbloggers and independent media are more positive; it will be a muddle for awhile most likely and either extreme optimism or extreme pessimism is unwarranted at this point.
Americans want to militarily confront Iran, want illegal warrantless eavesdropping, and are happy with how the country is being governed. No one wants to militarily confront Iran; many people think a confrontation is inevitable with a regime which is working to get nuclear weapons and has threatened to use them on us and our friends and that the major question is whether we confront them now or later. I thinks the threat is overblown. The question of the legality of the warrantless wiretaps is open to interpretation according to many lawyers who have written about it though I think it has minimal legal justification. Finally, many people are very unhappy and unsettled with the direction of the country and all roads lead to the White House, where the "buck stops."
I understand that Glenn Greenwald and those who agree with him would prefer a stronger and more accusatory tone, but one of the give-aways that a reaction is being fueled by emotion rather than reason is when a person is so thoroughly convinced of his certainty about things which are inherently uncertain. No one can possibly know how the Iraq war will ultimately turn out. If in two more years Iraq has a stable, functioning, albeit imperfect democracy, with American troops strength cut down to a manageable fraction of our current level, with a lower level of terrorism within Iraq, it will be considered a success. If in five years, Iraq has become a beacon of democracy in the middle East and other countries have taken tentative steps forward, it will be a success. If the level of violence and casualties remains the same for the next 2 years or the country disintegrates, it will have proved to be a partial or complete failure. Most of our arguments now should be directed toward what kinds of American actions will make either outcome more likely.
In my alternative phrasing I take the position of a Bush opponent and suggest the Bush administration is wrong in most of its positions; I include where there are reasonable disagreements. If I were writing a more detailed post, I would include specific words and actions of the Bush administration that I would suggest support my points.
The biggest problem with Greenwald's post is that he is so absolutely certain he is right. This is the very attitude that he decries in those he opposes.
Finally, in a particularly apt example of how the blogosphere works at its best, Instapundit and Roger Simon (in a particularly eloquent and pointed post) offered corrections of their erroneous posts that originally evoked Glenn Greenwald's ire, and in response, he offered an explanation, while not moving from his assertion that he accurately depicted the positions of the "Bush supporters."
My suggestion to Glenn Greenwald, and indeed, to all Bloggers, is to avoid trying to imagine we can know with any certainty what other people think. As a Psychiatrist, I cannot claim to know how Glenn thinks; I can only comment on what he writes. All we can know is how we interpret the words we read which may or may not correspond with exactly what the writer meant.
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