Notes from the line for the bathroom

Last night, while waiting for a bathroom in a diner, I talked to a kid about the Iraq war who said, though not in so many words, "Yeah, hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis have died from our bungled war, but many people died on 9/11. And what's more, people die all the time. Besides, Iraqis would also continue to die if we left."

I don't think this kid was callous or ignorant; I just think that for him (as for apparently at least a quarter of the country, judging by the polls) this horrible tragedy of a war doesn't hold the same real-world immediacy that 9/11 still retains. If you then add the false altruism of the idea that we need to stay there forever to save them from each other and you have a justification for endless continuation of the war that is nearly impossible to refute, simply because of the emotional resonance of its premise.

This isn't news, of course, since Bush and Co have been actively promoting it since the beginning, but it's definitely interesting to be reminded as plainly and as forcefully as I was last night. I believe that in the end this war will be regarded as a disaster and a tragedy, if not an enormous crime, but there are still many who consider it morally justifiable. This is not the result of any absence of ethics on their part, but the waters have been so thoroughly muddied that we'll need to filter out the bullshit for years before we see the whole truth.