Cursor links to a good LA Weekly article (by John R. McArthur of Harper's) about propaganda in the run-up to war. The point of the article is that governments lie to you when they want war -- but what's I find interesting is the nature of the propaganda McArthur describes. Nearly all of it has been about scary things, rather than the suffering of flesh-and-blood human beings as a result of scary things. Yes, we heard one (factually accurate) paragraph about torture in Iraq in the State of the Union address, and we've heard "he gassed his own people" over and over. But the bulk of the propaganda has been about aluminum tubes, airborne drones, and warheads that can be fitted with chemical weapons. We heard a lot more about "weapons of mass destruction" than we did about actual destruction (in, say, Halabja). The current Bushies never got us to the tie-a-yellow-ribbon level of fervor for war we reached in January '91. Were they just too cold-blooded and impersonal to manage this?