Iraq /irrational Thurs 8th Dec 2005

Having listened to excerpts of Harold Pinter's tirade, hominin psyche in full flood, I feel I must make some general comments if only to excrete some of the exasperation that is building up inside.

Pinter was only the extreme example among the many who are calling Bush and Blair war criminals, and talking about the oppression of the Iraqi people by the American and British occupiers. In fact, what is going on in Iraq is in some ways the same as before: murderers, most of them Sunni, are killing innocent men women and children, mostly Shia. Probably many of the killers are the same people who were doing that job for Saddam Hussein. The big difference is that the outside world had no images of what they were doing then, and now has a surfeit of information on their activities. I worked out from the information of 300,000 bodies in mass graves, that at about an average of 10,000 deaths a year the body count has hardly altered since the invasion, apart of course from American and British and other foreign national casualties. As with famine relief international action and public passion only gets energised by pictures. Even now the news I hear spends more time on detailing Saddam Hussein's "grievances" and tantrums than it devotes to the witnesses detailing the horrors they have suffered. Still he is allowed to conceal their sufferings by upstaging them. Radio 4 was playing his game, but I'll bet they don't recognise it; the hominin psyche cannot perceive two sides of the conflict as being bad, it has to identify with one or the other. So if America personified by Bush is the major villain the unconscious will be resisting a realistic portrayal of Saddam. So you get the regular comment "of course Saddam was terrible but...".

Once, in a self-help group working with a member who had suffered miseries in appalling accommodation, and when finally rehoused found he was still suffering, I asked the question "what percentage would you give it?" The answer was 50% "and what percentage of suffering was the previous accommodation?" "Oh 100%!" "So actually things have improved 50%?" And he could see it when it was put to him like that. He could not see it before because none of us do. It's not built into us to do so. It is not of evolutionary advantage to work out whether this Sabre tooth cat is bigger or smaller than the last one that threatened me. But it is of advantage to the media to represent this one as being bigger or more ferocious. But I should put that in evolutionary terms: a piece of career advantage to an individual reporter to make his story more sensational than that of his rivals. But again I must not just single out the media, we all do it, we all exaggerate a good story to gain an audience/status/attention/approval etc etc. (See update on gossip, still to be dictated). To come back to Iraq, neither the commentators outside nor I guess the majority of the Iraqis inside the country can appreciate that the situation is perhaps 25% better than it was under Saddam. I am sure people felt more in control, feeling that by such means as keeping a low profile etc they could avoid danger (the staying-hidden-in-the-thicket defence). In today's situation the feeling of not being in control will make it seem much worse. Of course the people being interviewed are mainly in Baghdad and so probably those who were not doing so badly before the war and therefore are worse off now. Many of the hysterically anti-war people managed to give the impression that things were fine in Iraq before we muscled in "it was the country at peace"!

I think one of the most powerful motivation at work is envy: the attacks on America are envious attacks. These originate in the psyche of a baby feeding at the breast of a mother whose stress is not due to physical deprivation. It was a problem defined by Melanie Klein who was dealing with middle-class mothers and children: mothers who were well fed, well clothed, well housed, but for psychological reasons were being experienced as rejecting mothers. Such a mother seems to have all the goodies needed by baby but will not share. You could see that America will easily provoke such a projection!

Some people will see me as an apologist for America. Not true, I loathe the Bush regime as much as anyone. But I also loathe the way the sufferings of Saddam's victims are obliterated by the anti-war brigade. The deaths that would have been happening if Saddam was still in power are also left out of their equation. How many Kurds, how many Marsh Arabs, how many Shia would have died if America had not maintained its anti-fly zones? The anti-war people peddle illusions as solutions "the war is wrong, there must be a better way, the United Nations should have been given more time" etc. Time for what? To produce as good a result as it has managed in Darfur? China is principally responsible for that failure, for the same reason, its oil interests, that is thrown at America in Iraq. But no one throws brickbats at China or blames it for the horrors still going on.! It is not rich enough to provoke envious attack nor is it benign enough; it requires a lot more gumption to bait the tiger than the bull, the former is a man eater, and the damage in the china shop is so much more noticeable. I was struck this morning (10-12-05) by the courtesy of an interviewer questioning a Chinese representative, much in contrast to the style adopted towards British or American spokespeople. In contrast, the least that can be said for Blair is that he is being realistic. Churchill dealt with Stalin, who I daresay would not have been his first choice for an ally. The charge of being Bush's poodle expresses the projection of the unsatisfying, often perceived as weak, parent "mummy/daddy never takes my side! She/he just agrees with whatever daddy/mummy says. No one listens to me it's not fair". This morning reading a novel by David Roberts the remark "we didn't stand up to Mussolini over Abyssinia, or to Japan over Manchuria" struck a chord. That was my most conscious original motivation for agreeing with the decision to go to war. Bad as it would be it could only get worse if left. No one invaded Yugoslavia: it's disintegration was an acting out on horrific scale of the ego fragmentation created in its people by decades of dictatorship. My guess is that this has not happened in Iraq because of the unifying effect of hatred that can be aimed at a visible, manageable, presence. The fact that America is not oppressing Iraq has been clearly proved by the demonstrations that have taken place, the Iraqis do trust the Americans not to treat them as Saddam would have done. The Iraqis can and do bait the bull. They are steadily gaining both the feeling of, and the reality of, control over their own lives. I think also that they are realistic enough to know, though they do not say it, that if in the end they had had to get rid of Saddam for themselves the results would have been quite as horrific, if not worse, as in the Balkans, and any outcomes unstable and unwonted.

Also suppressed is the memory that Saddam wanted to convince his own people and his neighbours that he still had weapons of mass destruction. He only had to allow enough doubt about their existence, and enough appearance of cooperation, to prevent action against him and he got that wrong, but only just. What did he believe? He never admitted defeat in the first war; was he actually in denial about the true situation? Did he fully realise the WMD were gone? He did not then, and still does not give the impression of a man governed by rationality rather than his hominin psyche. (I worry much more about WMD in the hands of the irrational, the psychotic).

I remember the fire prevention officer telling me that my responsibility was to see the people warned and if they ignored me to carry on to ensure everyone heard the warning not to stop and argue. I remember some years ago people dancing in a club ignored the warnings of fire officers I think, and some died in the fire. If the fire alarm is set off by a known arsonist, is that a reason to ignore it? Only once, of the many times the fire alarm sounded, was there a real fire, just starting, in the building; would you want to work under a manager whose policy was "ignore the alarm until you can see the flames"? If the gun is smoking someone has probably been shot. I don't want to live under a government that waits to be that sure. But of course the government/mummy is always in the wrong when citizens/baby feel bad. The anti-war movement now is fuelled by infantile rage, the destructive envious attacks are around power a.k.a. control. That's why they can't let go,  BOOKMARK  that's why the fight goes on to get Blair to apologise or admit he was wrong. Babies will do anything, bite, scratch, scream relentlessly, refuse food, even hold their breath till they go blue in the face, to get some control over mother. The welfare of the Iraqi people is the last thing on their hominin psyche whatever their sapiens psyche may be telling them. None of this is to deny the powerful rational arguments for and against the war, only to point out that which we see as most powerful depends largely on the experiences encoded in our hominin psyche. And of course on our level of actual responsibility. (13-12-05) I must finish this screed but can't do so without mentioning this morning's survey of Iraqi opinion. I've just looked at the BBC web page, the headline is that the survey showed optimism. The broadcast headline was that more people now disagree with the war, and more people now feel the situation is worse. The body of the news did fill out the positive details but still not to the extent that I discovered them on the Web report. The negative headlines are repeated on the hour, every hour; the more positive truths only once. This is the usual way that the news is distorted and a quite false impression fixed in people's minds. In fact the Iraq survey produced much the same results as one in this country in relation to the NHS: " the health service is doing badly but my personal experience has been very good". The media operates under the motto "Bad News is Good News, Good News is No News". This infuriates me but when I'm being rational I have to admit that this only reflects the concerns of the hominin psyche: bad news is top priority, good news has no priority. We didn't survive on the Pleistocene savanna by admiring the scenery and enjoying the weather.

My personal good news is that the website will be open for business this week and this tirade may be the first item that I upload with my own voice!