Death and its threat have powerful effects on people's thinking and emotions - but not always the desired or expected ones. Hence the supplementary psychological bombardments we are witnessing in Iraq (and, of course, are subject to) through the media.
The distribution of propaganda leaflets is one unadorned example. More nuanced is the national biases of the media and the progressively weakened objectivity of reporters in the field, due to bonding with the troops among whom they are embedded. Subtler still is political rhetoric, which is one of the most crucial weapons in the psychological arsenal.
Rhetoric makes use of a universal feature of the human mind - the urge to create order. The chaotic multiplicity of our day-to-day experience is simply too vast to manage. To make sense of the world, we have to boil things down. Rhetoric insinuates itself into this process. Metaphor and analogy are two of the potent tools used to influence the sort of 'conceptual shorthand' we use as we create our own internal sense of reality and truth. They attempt to get in on the psychological 'ground floor' of experience.
Take metaphor. The first US president George Bush was known for using it to sway public opinion leading up to the first Gulf war. According to philosopher Tim Rohrer, he rooted his view of the Iraq-Kuwait crisis in one of the Western world's most potent metaphors: that of 'nation as a person'.
This is important because much of his later arguments (including the since abandoned concept of the 'new world order') were 'logical' once we had been surreptitiously persuaded to accept the basic premise of this metaphor; that is, we should feel and act as if the countries involved were actual people with flesh and blood, and feelings and human rights.
To plant the metaphor in our consciousness, Mr Bush talked repeatedly about Iraq, Kuwait and the US as if they were real people. Iraq, the 'neighbourhood bully', was responsible for the 'rape' of Kuwait and the US must stand up for her friends to release Iraq's grip on that small nation's life before it was swallowed whole.
