Whats the likely effect of the publication of the photos of prisoners being tortured and humiliated?
It taints the war effort. There had been growing doubt about the war, and these pictures are already causing those doubts to intensify. There’s a sense that we have gotten into something very dirty that we can’t control, and that in certain aspects of that situation we’re behaving very badly. That [may make] the war seem less noble than we thought and not worth fighting. But there can also be the opposite reaction: That we shouldn’t make such a fuss about it, that [the prisoners] are nasty people. The beheading of the American [businessman] Nicholas Berg clearly evokes the extremity of the other side, in this case al Qaeda. The country is divided between these two views. They both represent what I call “survivor meaning” or “survivor mission” in relation to American deaths in Iraq and to the atrocities we’re seeing on the part of Americans in Iraq. Q: Is that one reason President Bush remains relatively popular in opinion polls? A: There’s a psychological tendency of any people to rall
