Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Pathological Hysteria

Melanie Phillips notices it, too. In discussing some of the revelations coming out of the Saddam papers being released, and the incredible indifference ("la belle indifference") (see here also) with which the MSM is treating this information, she notes:
Whatever the horrors now engulfing Iraq and whatever mistakes were made since the fall of Baghdad, the fact remains that the toppling of Saddam was a necessity for the west. Just because things are bad does not mean they could not have been worse. This simple fact has been all but obliterated from public discourse by the avalanche of lies and distortions from the anti-war crowd who have rewritten both history and present circumstances in order to say ‘I told you so’. The pathological hysteria with which they are doing so, however (see today’s Independent newspaper, for example) suggests that at some level they know they are denying this patently obvious truth.


As the lies and distortions of the left continue to unravel, you will see even more denial and projection on their part. They will say that it is Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Cheney, etc. etc. etc. who are denying obvious truths; and they will say it loudly; they will scream it puctuated by four-letter words; they will demand that they are right and that the US has lost and should surrender. They are pathologically unable to see anything else in their hysterical state.

Bush must be wrong. The U.S. must be evil. Otherwise, they would have to re-evaluate their premises and see their ideology for the soul-less, anti-freedom, anti-human credo it really is.

And that is a reality they cannot face.

As I said in an earlier piece:
Some day in the future after events have unfolded; and after all intended and unintended consequences have played themselves out; the spineless traitors and apologists of the left, who have done nothing to advance the cause of freedom and democracy in Iraq--or in the world, for that matter--and instead have actively and enthusiastically supported the enemy's psychological operations and become their propaganda outlets, will be finally subjected to evaluation by history; and their true psychological motivations will not be in doubt.

Because, however events turn out in Iraq--for good or ill, and there is certainly no guarantee that what is right and good will always overcome-- the underlying motivations of the left (and all those who proclaim themselves to be the champions of the little guy, and yet for some reason always end up defending the Milosovics and Saddams of the world; and always enabling the Hitlers and Bin Ladens) are perfectly clear to anyone who will look.


And that is the frightening truth that all the hysteria is meant to disguise.

UPDATE: One thing that I have always thought was completely saturated with hysteria and overblown emotionalism is the left's bizarre notions about the military (burned into their brains no doubt after Vietnam). neo-neocon discusses that hyperventilating excess rather eloquently:

A great deal of the rhetoric against the war focuses on the toll it's taken on our military.That's an interesting message.

On the one hand, we all mourn every military life lost; the human toll is devastating and dreadful (see this).

But the harsh and terrible truth is that, if we are not prepared to incur military losses, we may as well not have a military and not fight at all. We have now advanced so far in the laudable goal of minimizing casualties that the numbers posted on the previously linked antiwar website for the three years of this war--2317 US deaths, 1860 in combat--are considered unconscionable.

"Ah, warmonger!" I can hear some of you cry at what I am about to say next. But pointing out that this is a relatively low death toll, as three-year wars go, is not the same as saying that any of these deaths should not be mourned. They are mourned, and should be mourned, deeply.But if the message of that mourning is that that is an unacceptably high number, the message is that if an enemy mounts a war of attrition against us, the numbers don't even have to be very high to defeat us. A slow, steady trickle will do.
Just as an anchor to reality, here are two graphs I appropriated from Gateway Pundit; one shows a comparison of American deaths from different wars; and the other shows Iraqi deaths under Saddam compared with current violence:



According to Gateway, the harsh truth is that "Before the War in Iraq, Saddam was filling his mass graves and keeping state hired rapists on his payroll. In those 20 years about 5% of the people of Iraq were killed or mysteriously disappeared. The red area in the graph above shows the estimated average deaths in Iraq under Saddam Hussein from 36 average deaths per day from mass grave discoveries, to 137 deaths per day from a different source. The yellow area shows estimated total fatalities since the beginning of the War in Iraq from Iraq Body Count, an antiwar website."

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