Today Interviewee fights back: motives, real or imputed. Sat 10th June

I picked up William Shawcross accusing the program of exploiting a father whose son had been killed by al Zarqawi, and checked back later to hear the whole thing; it was good to hear this being put into words because the program does exploit people who it knows will express the views that feed its agenda. But in fact quite a lot of what the father, William? Burke?, had to say was very valid and needed to be said, about the bloody effects of revenge etc, his interrogator coming from the perspective that someone in his position should be rejoicing over the death of al Zarqawi while he on the contrary was maintaining the value of any human life. But he was equating the actions of al Zarqawi with those of Bush and Blair and laying the greater blame on the latter; the apparent challenges to these views were in fact questions designed to elicit more obvious anti-war condemnation. He was questioned about the motives and claimed that al Zarqawi's were understandable and admissible in fighting for Iraq against the aggression, while the motives of Bush and Blair were culpable. This is the standard attitude of the anti-war demagogue, totally irrational and in denial of the known facts. Zarqawi was a Jordanian and had no business to be doing anything in Iraq, and how murdering Shiite civilians could be an effective blow on behalf of the country remained of course unexplained because never questioned. The interviewer's repeated reference to the horror of his son's death was exploitative and the excuse given for choosing this interviewee yet again (as Shawcross commented he had been saying the same things for two years), was supremely disingenuous: the death of Zarqawi gave a new context. What it gave of course was just another excuse to bring back for another airing exactly the views that the interviewer wanted us to hear. It was from Shawcross that one heard about the heads found in boxes in the village of Zarqawi's family, but I've already commented on how this program distorts the news by selection and omission.

Sun 11th June. As usual there is so much I want to say and I can't get it out so that Dragon gets it right. I will focus on motivation, conscious and unconscious. The bereaved father, now standing for office, denied any political ambitions and claimed he only wanted to change things for the better. But that desire is a political ambition and is common to most democratic politicians; it is indeed, common to the majority of people in relation to their chosen work. The charge of being self-interested thrown at politicians is of course also common to the majority of mankind and also of womankind if one takes children as an indivisible part of "woman-self". That parent had been deprived of his genetic posterity and was creating a symbolic posterity in its place. This is the pressure from the hominin psyche being translated and projected onto the possible; the reason "my child will not have lived/died in vain" can be read with the personal pronoun substituted for my child. This is in no way a criticism, this is what it means to be human, our genetic heritage ennobled. The fundamental difference between this father and say, Tony Blair, is responsibility. Blair is in a position of huge responsibility and must base his decisions on the welfare the population as a whole not just those who will die in Iraq.

I will take as an example Germany between the Wars. Hitler was breaking treaties and demonstrating what might be called problematic attitudes and behaviour. There was justification for going into Germany on the basis of those broken treaties and the results no doubt would have been pretty bad, but they might have prevented the Holocaust. Who could ever have imagined or conceived the horror of that "might have been" in that scenario? What is happening in Iraq is not the result of the invasion; it is the inevitable result of decades of brutal suppression. No one attacked Yugoslavia, or the Soviet Union, or Haiti: the descent into violent criminal chaos, more or less disguised as patriotic conflict by individuals aiming for personal dominance, is what happens when all trust has been destroyed and "survival of the fittest" is the only reliable law in operation. The results were less appalling in the Soviet Union because the brutality had been diminishing over time. The opposite was the case in Iraq. No one in Iraq would ever say, or even recognise, that most Iraqis unconsciously trust the Americans more than they do many of their own countrymen; they would not have voted in such large numbers if that was not true. The resulting government is not condemned in Iraq as an American puppet regime.

I've got off the point again, back to motives.

(Wed 14th June) I will add yesterday's example: I first heard on the World Service of Bush's visit to Iraq at five minutes notice with the word from a BBC commentator to the effect that this might be seen as a bit of an insult, not to trust the Iraqi Prime Minister with this sensitive information in advance. An hour or two later I was hearing a BBC correspondent relating, in answer to the question what were people in Baghdad thinking about the visit, that Iraqis he had spoken to had said they thought it insulting. I wonder what question he asked them. Could it have been "do you think it's insulting that your Prime Minister was not given more notice"? As an assertion trainer questions, leading and open, were matter for my elucidation; not having heard the question I can never trust the answers that are reported to me in this way. It is as likely for a person consciously trying not to lead in this way, still unconsciously to provoke the answer unconsciously required.

Back to motives yet again (15th June and all the book references on the website from the Fs onwards have disappeared! Has anything else gone? I can't read through all hundred thousand words to check. Phone engaged so while waiting must block anxiety and try to get on). I intended to talk of the motives of Zarqawi versus those of Bush and Blair. All three have religious motives which in general terms are the same, "to do God's will", one sees this in overt political terms, two do not. Zarqawi clearly sees killing people as acts reflecting the will of God directly; it is equally clear that Bush and Blair do not. Coalition forces, in spite of notorious lapses, having in general made efforts to avoid killing civilians. From Bush and Blair's point of view such deaths are damaging to their political survival, to give them no better motive  BOOKMARK  but at least one that cannot be denied by their opponents. For Zarqawi the unpredictable death of innocent people is politically advantageous, terrified people are more likely to accept religious tyranny for the sake of stability and security, though of course he would not express it in that way.

What has been impressed on the hominin psyche that leads Zarqawi to perceive the will of God in the way he does can be guessed at; the one clue, that he was very close to his mother, confirms my type of guessing, the word close often hinting at a strong negative bond. Someone like Zarqawi (or the Spanish Inquisition) would claim to be concerned with the spiritual welfare of his people, and can see this as quite contrary to their physical welfare: the anti-libidinal lie. Bush and Blair were certainly motivated by the welfare of their own people which they equally certainly considered to encompass their physical as well as mental and spiritual welfare. The situation in Iraq was clearly a threat because without intervention, leaving aside all considerations of WMDs, it was extremely likely to produce regional conflict again sooner or later, with disruption of oil supplies and many other serious consequences. The cry that we could have continued to contain Saddam Hussein -- for ever? -- was always rubbish; sanctions were being avoided and continuous military action was needed -- the no-fly zones -- and of course people were dying then probably in as large numbers as now, but of course more invisibly. Zarqawi's behaviour is in one way an extreme example of Saddam's; both were in a sense holding the population to ransom to obtain power and hold onto it, one might say their unconscious personal survival issues were bound to that power (remember Saddam murdered his sons-in-law). For Blair and Bush their personal survival is probably more healthily bound into their extended family and so into the welfare of their society at large. The unconscious survival issues of the anti-war voices seem very bound up with bringing down Blair and Bush, and so to require, unconsciously, failure and destruction in Iraq; the demand for an apology from Blair which was very strident a while back much resembled the child's cry for recognition from the parent it experiences as betraying its expectations. (I'm sorry I said the dentist wouldn't hurt, I was wrong).