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Recent Stories
March 26, 2003
Bruce Jackson
A Battlefield from Hell
Pablo
Mukherjee
Watch Their Lips
David Krieger
Shock But Not Awe
Linda
Heard
Winning Hearts and Minds Bush-Style
Imad Jadaa
The Beautiful Face of America
Adam
Engel
Buckets of Blood
Patrick Cockburn
Kurds Unimpressed
David
Lindorff
POWs, Torture and Hypocrisy
Robert Fisk
The Coup That Didn't Happen
April
Hurley, MD
A Doctor's Outrage in Baghdad
Gloria Bergen
Chretien's Shame
Reema
Abu Hamdieh
The Smell of Death Surrounds Me
March 25, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Life During Wartime
Gary
Leupp
What Democracy Looks Like: the Streets
of Cairo
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
An Interview with Hanan Ashrawi
Bruce
Jackson
Why Protest? Why Write?
Uri Avnery
Bitter Rice: Thoughts and Warnings on
the War
Jason
Leopold
Blood Indicator: Casualties and the Stock
Market
Ralph Nader
A Pre-emptive War on a Defenseless Country
March 24, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Ominous Signs
David
Lindorff
Peacekeepers at Ground Zero
Diane Christian
Blood Sacrifice
Kathy
Kelly
The Morning After Shock and Awe
John Stanton
US Bombs Iran
Wayne
Madsen
How to Live with a Rogue Superpower
Anthony Gancarski
Iraq and the Death of the West
David
Vest
Earth vs. Bush
Ahmad Faruqui
The Liberation of Iraq in Perspective
Robert
Fisk
We Bomb, They Suffer
March 22 / 23, 2003
Edward Said
The Other America
Saul Landau
The Threats of Empire
Kathleen and Bill Christison
On the Road in the West Bank
Joanne Mariner
Suing Seymour Hersh
Ann Harrison
The Battle of San Francisco
Robert Fisk
A Cauldron of Fire
Hani Shukrallah
The Gates of Hell
Chris Floyd
Memory Lane
Kathy Kelly
Imagine Chicago Under This Kind of Attack
Ramzi Kysia
Bombing Away a Chance for Joy
Linda Heard
Baghdad Burns While Bush Does Lunch
Bradley Burston
Could the US be at War for Years?
Salvador Peralta
Mass Murder as Liberation?
Tom Gorman
Now That's a Coalition!
Jorge Mariscal
Johnny Mack, When Are You Coming Back?
Cindy Milstein
The Grassroots Go Global
Josh Frank
Blocking Portland's Bridges
Elaine Cassel
The Case of Elizabeth Smart: Kidnapping and Insanity
Gordon Solberg
Drowning in Niceness: the Lessons of Elizabeth Smart
Tom Crumpacker
Getting to Know the Real Havana
Poets' Basement
Dobie, Guthrie, Alam, Wechsler
March 21, 2003
Ben Tripp
Blood for Oil:
the Exchange Rate
Cathy Breens
Report from Baghdad: Mothers, Kids and Crash Kits
Scott Handleman
Fourth
Generation Protesting: Shutting Down San Francisco
Vanessa Jones
Paint Them
Red
Brian J. Foley
Patriotic Protest
for Professors
Zoltan Grossman
After Saddam, a War on Iraqi Rebels?
Philip S. Golub
Inventing Demons
Richard Lichtman
On the Current Experience of Terror
Milan Rai
Blitz-Coup
Pepe Escobar
A Cheap Family Farce
Floyd Rudmin
The Nightmare at the Back Door: Nuclear Plant's as Terror Targets
Chris Floyd
See Rome (poem)
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
March 20, 2003
Stephen Banko
I Was a Soldier
Once
Kevin Alexander Gray
How Did We Become
an Outlaw Nation?
Shane Claiborne
Nomadic
Solidarity: Glimpses of Life in Baghdad on the Eve of War
Kathy Kelly
Waiting on the Baghdad Skies to Crack
Anthony Gancarski
Michelle
Makin's "Liberty Shields"
Rahul Mahajan and Robert Jensen
Myths and
Facts About the War on Iraq
Jason Leopold
Cheney's
Lies About Halliburton and Iraq
Ron Jacobs
If War is Business as Usual, There Should be No Business as Usual
Chuck O'Connell
Predictions About the Iraq War
Douglas Herman
US Air Force Veteran on the Coming Air Campaign
Ralph Nader
Come On Democrats,
Stand Up for Peace
William Hughes
War is Theft
Sima Saeedi
Dispatch from
Iran
Hammond Guthrie
John Philip Sousa
Website of the Day
Iraq
Body Count
Hot Stories
Gore Vidal
The Erosion
of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach Bush:
A Draft Resolution
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March
27, 2003
War, Peace and Bureaucracy
The Problem
of Empathy
By RICHARD THIEME
It
feels like that moment when Obi-Wan Kenobi suddenly lowered his head
as if he had a bad headache and said he sensed a disturbance in the
force.
In that Star Wars
episode, Obi-Wan was feeling the explosion of a planet and the dying
of all its inhabitants.
Its hard to stay
in denial when a whole planet is exploding.
Which those of us
on earth should realize right about now.
I don’t mean
it’s the end of civilization or anything apocalyptic.
It’s more
the end of a youthful phase. Every generation has its own passage when
it loses innocence. We tried to tell our kids what it was like during
Viet Nam, when the cities burned after the assassinations, when Watergate
threatened to bring down the government, but everybody has to hear the
screams for themselves. There’s no mistaking them, once you hear
them. No forgetting them either.
You have to compartmentalize
what you’re doing, a veteran told me candidly. You’re killing
people, sometimes innocent people. You have to understand that in a
way that makes it OK.
Now, I confess to
being radically impractical. It has plagued me my whole life long. So
take what I say with a grain of salt. This reflection won’t help
you make more money, get a promotion, or manipulate some demographic
into buying what you’re selling. But I feel the headache coming
on that says there’s a disturbance in the force and maybe this
will help.
It’s about
feeling, not thinking. Too much thinking results in software that mistakes
our planes for supersonic enemy missiles and shoots them down. Too much
thinking gives machines the responsibility for too much of the fighting.
We need to listen to feelings once in a while and remember that the
enemy is human too.
Years ago, when
I was a clergyman doing counseling, I had to learn how not to open myself
completely to others’ feelings. I had to set boundaries so I wouldn’t
mistake myself for others. Frequently in the evening when I expressed
anxiety about something, my wife would say, That’s not you. It’s
someone else. You’re mistaking yourself for someone else.
So empathy can be
a problem. Appropriate distance is necessary. But too much distance
can make us deaf to what others are trying to tell us. Too little empathy
and policy and planning can go awry.
I wonder how I would
feel if here in the Midwest we had been bombarded for months with leaflets
or heard on our radios whenever we turned them on the French-accented
English of Quebecois explaining how the Bush Regime so threatened them
that self-preservation required that they liberate us from its tyranny
before it could strike first. They would warn us not to resist when
they came across the border and rolled toward Chicago. They were doing
this, they said, not for the complex reasons that usually lead people
to start a war but for our own good and the good of the world. They
expect us, therefore, to line the interstate waving Quebec flags gleefully
as their armor thunders past.
I mean, are these
people in touch with reality AT ALL?
Ten days ago in
Washington DC, some of the smartest people I know in information security
repeatedly said things like, Bush has gone about this the wrong way.
He believes he’s right so deeply that nothing can stop him. Now
we’ve got to try to salvage the situation.
These are not knee-jerk
responses, mind you, these are people who understand the threats. They
listen to intercepts and hear terrorists plan our demise. What we hear,
one told me, scares us shitless.
They know the world
is messy and complex and motives always mixed. They are patriots, working
long hours out of the spotlight on behalf of a country they love. Yet
so many were deeply concerned about how this thing was done.
Despite the rhetoric
of post 9/11, little has changed in our nation’s capital. People
still talk primarily to themselves. Outside the beltway its hard to
understand the smallness of the vision that results. It’s difficult
to overstate how bureaucracies kill the human spirit, filter out people
who take risks or respond to challenges not by hiding but by rising
to the occasion. It sounds like a caricature so say that the agency
across the river is more often the primary competitor while real evildoers
are secondary targets but its not. Trying to suggest that they’re
forgetting something is like little people tugging at the cuffs of big
people lost in conversation in the clouds high above.
Forgetting, for
example, that empathy is critical to policy and planning because troops
can take Baghdad and all Iraq and still lose the real war, the one that
begins when the shooting stops. Forgetting that the mind of society
is the enclosed battlespace of the 21st century, all war is theater,
and audiences super-saturated with media images are the main players.
Forgetting that the real shock and awe is ours, when we realized they
were surprised by how the world responded, how natives fought on their
own territory, and by the growing concern of Americans who bought a
war against terrorism but somehow were delivered a land war in Iraq.
Empathy is required
for winning the peace if not for winning the war. Understanding the
feelings of human beings and the consequences of our actions seems like
a minimal requirement for policy and planning but apparently its not.
The capacity to get outside ourselves and feel what others feel does
not mean surrendering our self-interest in some naive belief that others
are better than ourselves because they’re not--there is no moral
high ground when the shooting starts--but it does mean understanding
who others are because then we remember who we are too and then we might
remember that mutual self- interest is best served by a vision that
sees further than the middle of next week.
Richard
Thieme speaks, writes and consults on the human dimensions
of life and work, the impact of technology, and "life on the edge."
He is a contributing editor for Information Security Magazine. Articles
in Wired, Salon, Information Security, CISO, Forbes, Secure Business
Quarterly, Village Voice, others. He can be reached at: rthieme@thiemeworks.com
Today's Features
March 26, 2003
Pablo
Mukherjee
Watch Their Lips
David Krieger
Shock But Not Awe
Linda
Heard
Winning Hearts and Minds Bush-Style
Imad Jadaa
The Beautiful Face of America
Adam
Engel
Buckets of Blood
Patrick Cockburn
Kurds Unimpressed
David
Lindorff
POWs, Torture and Hypocrisy
Robert Fisk
The Coup That Didn't Happen
April
Hurley, MD
A Doctor's Outrage in Baghdad
Gloria Bergen
Chretien's Shame
Reema
Abu Hamdieh
The Smell of Death Surrounds Me
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
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