You know what’s hard about being ignorant? The gaps in my knowledge don’t stand out like big white areas on the map. The brain, in its wonderful way, just closes up those empty spaces, making them disappear.

It’s like what happens to the area in your visual field obscured by your blind spot. You can verify that it’s there by covering one eye and moving a card with a pair of dots around until one of the dots disappears. But unless you make the effort to expose it, you’re not aware that you’re missing anything.

So with Iraq. We’re all ignorant to a greater or lesser degree about what’s going on there. But we’re not really aware of the extent of our own ignorance (though we of course have a crystal clear notion of the other guy’s ignorance; that stands out in flashing neon).

So let’s see if we can fill in some of that terra incognita. But first, consider the following quotation from Gen. George W. Casey, Jr.’s testimony before Congress on Friday, as noted by Kevin Drum:

Asked whether the insurgency has worsened, Casey said it has not expanded geographically or numerically, “to the extent we can know that.” But he noted that current “levels of violence are above norms,” exceeding 500 attacks a week. “I’ll tell you that levels of violence are a lagging indicator of success,” he added.

For some reason that strikes me funny. I realize it’s a deadly serious subject (more literally so than usual), but still, there’s something about the old military man, conditioned to deliver information accurately and succinctly, who I’m guessing has now been ordered to lie by his civilian overseers. And like Hal in 2001 (at least as revealed in 2010), he ends up exhibiting some pretty wacky behavior in his effort to reconcile the conflicting requirements.

Asked if the insurgency has worsened, and faced with the clear fact that it has, he does his best to find a way to put a positive spin on it. But unlike someone like Rumsfeld, who would simply set sail on the sea of falsehood and lie, saying something like, “Oh, no, no, no, no. Of course not. Nothing could be further from the truth,” Casey feels compelled to keep one foot on the shore, so to speak.

Okay; maybe it’s not so funny.

Anyway, here’s some of the actually informative stuff I’ve been reading about Iraq lately:

• The view from Iraq – an on-the-ground report from Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), whose district I mostly grew up in, and for whom I have voted in the past, though I haven’t been her constituent for a number of years.
• What’s wrong with cutting and running? – from retired Gen. William E. Odom, head of the NSA during the Reagan administration.
• Can the US military presence avert civil war? – by Jim Lobe. Lobe is what our conservative friends would refer to as a “liberal.” You have been warned.
• Why immediate withdrawal makes sense – by Michael Schwartz. Schwartz, likewise liberal, is a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

  Fill in those blind spots, people!

This entry was posted by jbc on Saturday, October 1st, 2005 at 1:56 am and is filed under war. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.