Lew and Sean: You don't understand: it's all right for the United States to use chemical weapons against Iraqis - just as it is all right to torture people - because Americans don't BELIEVE in such practices! We can be trusted to engage in such behavior because we say that we are opposed to doing so. Didn't George Bush say as much yesterday?
The thinking of most of us is wrapped up in treating our abstractions and images as "reality." When a contradiction arises, we think it sufficient to forcefully restate our adherence to abstract principles and then proceed with violating them. Perhaps this is why Stalin's quantitatively more butcherous practices have received only a sliver of condemnation: his regime had a better song-and-dance (re the Marxist opposition to "exploitation," etc.) than did Hitler's.
