On Thursday, just before a post about "big media versus Americans" that linked to Instapundit, and just after a posted entitled "Cheer up Hawks," Andrew Sullivan found time to come down off his mountain and actually post a reader's response to something he wrote on his blog (Sullivan does not have comments on his blog):

EMAIL OF THE DAY: "It was interesting to hear about the jump in hits on blogger web-sites. Let me suggest that it is due not so much to the Nick Berg video, but to the combination, or sequence, of the Abu Gharib photos AND the Nick Berg Video. For me, the Abu Gharib photos acted like a slate cleaner. Like you, after I first saw those photos I fell into a deep funk where I started to question everything that had made me a staunch supporter of the war. While in this funk I realized that much of my rationale for going to war was underpinned by an unformed, yet felt assumption that it would go well. Those photos yanked that all away."

Let me suggest that it was not just the Abu Gharib pictures and the Nick Berg video, but also the picture from late March of the lynched mercenaries that has contributed to the national "funk" about the war. However, no matter what the actual sequence of the images, this email was enlightening to me as both Sullivan and his unnamed reader openly admitted that their support for the war "was underpinned by an unformed, yet felt assumption that it would go well." Sweet Jeebus! It scares the living crap out of me that supposedly well-informed people would use such vague rationale to support a war.  

This email was also enlightening for the way Sullivan and his reader admitted to having their view of the war temporarily shaken, and then permanently altered, simply by seeing images of the war:

"So then what happened? Into this void gets poured the images of an innocent civilian being savagely beheaded. Now unencumbered by unspoken assumptions that this would be easy, I see the true nature of what we are up against, and am more committed to winning the thing than ever before. I wonder if many in the blogopshere are experiencing the same phenomenon." The guy's right; and count me in among those in this emotional whiplash. I feel more committed to getting the liberation right than I have for months.

First I can't believe that the person writing the email actually uses the phrase "unspoken assumptions that this would be easy," when we were constantly told how easy it would be to turn Iraq into Japan or Germany.

Second, if images from Iraq, especially those of the violent deaths of a civilian,  play such an admittedly formative role in the opinions of hawks such as Sullivan, no wonder he is still in support of the war. The excruciating images of Iraq civilians being savagely killed and/or wounded have hardly ever been released over the mainstream media (the same media Sullivan complains of being victimized by). If he thought the Abu Gharib and Nick Berg images were bad, then I wonder what he would think of the war if he saw these:

WARNING: These pictures are not faked, nor do they portray the Iraq war according the the Bush administration's talking points. Further, there are thousands of similar photos. Still further, I did not post even close to the most extreme photos.

Click on the time & date stamp below to view the photo's in the extended entry.