Comfortably numb

From A G.O.P. Senator Charts a Middle Course, September 3, 2007:

As he toured the state recently, [Senator Lamar] Alexander took the opportunity to explain his approach on Iraq, which essentially boils down to gradually shifting United States forces from direct combat operations to more training and equipping of Iraqi forces, with a concentration on stabilizing the country province by province. He said such a strategy could lead to a significant drawdown of troops within a year or slightly longer.

Despite the gravity of the issue, Mr. Alexander typically had to raise the subject on his own or respond to news media questions on the subject; he was not pressed on it directly by the public even after a detailed talk on Iraq at a crowded Rotary Club meeting in Jackson or his appearance in Murfreesboro.

Representative Jim Cooper, a Democrat who appeared with Mr. Alexander in Nashville, said a certain numbness had set in among Tennesseans when it came to the war. “It is kind of like a low-grade fever,” Mr. Cooper said. “It worries them, but they are so used to the drumbeat of death, destruction and confusion they don’t know how to react.”

And Democrat Focuses on the Financial Toll, September 3, 2007:

In talking to constituents about Iraq during lawmakers’ August break, Mr. Mahoney emphasized his outrage over the financial cost of the war, hoping that the same message of fiscal conservatism that helped elect him would once again resonate with voters and help establish his reputation as a centrist Democrat in a district where President Bush won with more than half the vote in 2000 and in 2004.

“You have got to understand, for the last seven years all the money has been going to Iraq, all the money has been going to homeland security,” Mr. Mahoney said Wednesday at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon in the Village of Wellington, Fla.

“The president has been trying to keep it off the balance sheets so you don’t know how bad it is,” he added. “I’m here to tell you it’s bad.”

In Wellington, which is best known for its polo grounds and equestrian centers, Mr. Mahoney did not get a single question about the war, which he attributed to his constituents having made up their minds and being satisfied with where he stands.

Carmen A. Priore, a member of the Wellington Village Council who attended the lunch, had a different explanation. “A lot of people sitting here in the chamber, they are concerned about how am I going to make a mortgage payment,” Mr. Priore said. “Iraq seems so distant.”

Jonathan Schell, writing in The New Yorker on March 13, 1971:

Five years or so ago, when everyone knew that the war was getting larger, the slightest suggestion of an invasion of the north caused as uproar. But now, when the war is supposed to be "winding down," these suggestions pass almost unnoticed, although there is no reason to believe that the consequences of an invasion now would be any different from the what the consequences would have been then. This war has gone to our brain. It has drugged us. Our reflexes have slowed down. Our altertness has been blunted.

I watched in a kind of drugged silence Katie Couric last night, making "Her first trip to Iraq," as she described the great success "the surge" is having in Anbar Province. You knew she was serious because her hair was tied back and she wasn't smiling. Earlier in the day, I'd read Michael Gordon's oh so carefully balanced report on the strategy to support Sunni tribal chiefs, The Former Insurgent Counter-Insurgency ("they may turn against us later, but for now the enemy of my enemy is my friend"), again pointing to Anbar as the model for success. The power of the military in Iraq is similar to the power of the president in the U.S.: they each control the message and the context (coincidently visiting Anbar Province!). We only know what the military tells us, as there is very little independent reporting either in Iraq or in the White House. So expect to hear more about the stunning success of Anbar in the days leading up to the Petraeus/Crocker report, and very little about Basra or about how successes like Anbar could very well be creating the conditions that will worsen political reconciliation, not improve it -- the whole point of "the surge" in the first place.