Manning, You know about as much about "the Iraqi people" and thier opinions,
as you do about American politics.

Your democratic "candidates" stand up and promise every freeloading, lazy
bum in the country yet more social programs they know they can't possibly
enact,

tell every lie which the "polls" say will get them elected, and you have the
guts to
critize President Bush?

"John Manning" <jrobertm@terra.com.br> wrote in message
news:102fvcqndi20h50@news.supernews.com...

"Democracy, which is classically defined as “government by the people,”
is non-existent. Local leaders are chosen by U.S. authorities, and the
U.S.-proposed caucuses for picking national leaders by the end of June
are designed to achieve similar controlled results, not grant any
meaningful autonomy to the Iraqi people."


Political Psychosis & Election 2004

By Nat Parry
Consortium News, February 9, 2004
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/021004.html


Election 2004 is shaping up not only as a choice of presidential
candidates but a test of whether reality still matters to the American
people, whether a new paradigm of lies and distortions that has taken
hold since Election 2000 will be extended indefinitely.

In many ways, Bush’s State of the Union speech on Jan. 20 can be viewed
as a marker for how far the nation has traveled down this road of deceit
and how commonplace the deceptions have become. Sometimes the deceit is
brazen; other times subtle.

Bush, for instance, boasted in his speech that his administration had
protected the U.S. mainland from terrorist attack during the 28 months
since Sept. 11, 2001 – “over two years without an attack on U.S. soil.”
Bush’s boast might have sounded a lot shakier if his administration had
not hidden the fact that a terrorist had mailed the poison ricin to the
White House in November 2003, two months before the speech.

Only after another batch of the poison was intercepted in a Capitol Hill
mailroom in early February did the administration acknowledge the
earlier White House attack, a delay that may have allowed Bush to safely
make his boast although some law enforcement officials say the secrecy
put lives at risk.

Other times in this new paradigm, words are used to confuse reason. So,
Bush, who has charted a future course of near-endless war, is praised
for his optimistic “forward strategy,” while people who criticize the
national leader are condemned for practicing “political hate speech.”

New Sales Pitch

In much the same way, “democracy” has become the new sales pitch for the
Iraqi occupation now that last year’s fearsome warnings of Iraqi weapons
of mass destruction have imploded. Vast stockpiles of chemical and
biological weapons and the prospects of “mushroom clouds” have shrunk
into – as Bush put it in his State of the Union address – “weapons of
mass destruction-related program activities.”

But as a substitute for those missing WMD stockpiles, the American
people are now assured that “democracy is taking hold” in Iraq. The only
trouble is from some “Saddam supporters” and “foreign terrorists” who
are trying to thwart democracy by taking violent action against the
occupation. That simplistic depiction, however, is no more truthful than
were Bush’s WMD claims a year ago.

The reality is that almost 10 months since U.S. forces seized Baghdad,
Iraqis live under a harsh occupation in which U.S. troops often use
deadly force against civilian targets. Iraqis also must live their lives
dodging anti-U.S. bombings that kill indiscriminately.

Democracy, which is classically defined as “government by the people,”
is non-existent. Local leaders are chosen by U.S. authorities, and the
U.S.-proposed caucuses for picking national leaders by the end of June
are designed to achieve similar controlled results, not grant any
meaningful autonomy to the Iraqi people.

The U.S. caucus plan calls for the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional
Authority to appoint the members of 18 regional organizing committees.
The committees would then select delegates to form caucuses. These
delegates would, in turn, select representatives to a transitional
national assembly, which then would pick Iraq’s new government.

Rather than representing the will of the people, however, the caucuses
most resemble a shell game in which the movement of the various caucus
components hides the fact that the occupation authorities, by picking
the initial organizing committees, ultimately calls the shots. This
reality is obvious to Iraqis, though rarely noted in the U.S. news
media, which parrots the Bush administration’s language about the
caucuses as a crucial step toward Iraqi “democracy.”

False Sovereignty

To many Iraqis, the convoluted caucus system simply means that the
occupation authorities want to ensure that the new Iraqi government is
acceptable to Washington. Most importantly, whatever “sovereignty” is
handed over to these Iraqi “leaders” it certainly won’t include the
right to order U.S. troops to leave Iraq or to place any meaningful
constraints on the occupation.

In defense of the caucus system, the Bush administration has argued that
popular elections, without a formal census and fully-vetted voting
lists, might fall short of an optimum democratic result, a theme that
the U.S. news media also has repeated over and over again. But what is
virtually never mentioned in the U.S. press is that the caucus system is
guaranteed to produce an undemocratic result. That is one of the reasons
it has been opposed by mass demonstrations in the Iraqi streets and by
prominent leaders, such as the Shiites’ Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.

For the foreseeable future, the U.S.-brokered Iraqi “democracy” also
isn’t likely to grant such basic democratic freedoms as freedom of the
press, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of movement, or
freedom from unreasonable search and seizure.

Nor is it likely that U.S.-demanded security conditions as a
prerequisite for elections can be achieved any time soon. If, as U.S.
officials claim, a voting census could not be done in the first months
of the U.S. occupation – when the Iraqi resistance was scattered and
ineffective – why will those prospects get any brighter now that the
insurgency has spread and is far more lethal?

The irony is that whatever signs of real democracy exist in Iraq are
manifested in a rising popular movement against the U.S. occupation.
Mass demonstrations have demanded direct elections, rather than the
U.S.-planned caucuses.

One U.S. nightmare has been that a religious figure like Sistani emerges
as the popularly chosen national leader. Not only might a popularly
elected leader order the U.S. forces out but a true Iraqi nationalist
might deny U.S. corporations unfettered access to Iraq’s resources.

Darkening Reality

While Bush’s State of the Union touted U.S. progress in Iraq, the
darkening strategic reality is that the Bush administration may have set
in motion forces that could lead to a geopolitical crisis for U.S.
interests, one that U.S. government policy has sought to avert for a
quarter century.

Over that period, Washington has maneuvered to block the spread of
Islamic fundamentalism from Iran to Iraq, where it could threaten the
stability of the Persian Gulf oil states, including Saudi Arabia. That
was the major reason for Washington’s real-politik backing of Saddam
Hussein’s brutal regime in the 1980s. Iraq was seen as the chief bulwark
against Iran’s Islamic fundamentalism.

Indeed, it was this policy of U.S. containment of anti-Western Islamic
fundamentalism and the protection of Saudi Arabia that was a driving
motive behind Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and the Sept. 11 terror attacks
on New York and Washington. Hussein’s secular government was one of the
obstacles to bin Laden’s vision of an Islamic region purged of Western
influence, as was the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia.

Ironically, the Bush administration has advanced both of bin Laden’s
goals by eliminating Hussein’s government and withdrawing U.S. troops
from Saudi Arabia.

Now, the Bush administration finds itself in the tricky position of
having to resist – rather than promote – the tide of democracy in Iraq.
The reason is that popular elections could lead to a Shiite-dominated
Islamic state that might then ally itself with Iran, putting on the spot
the corrupt pro-U.S. monarchies in Saudi Arabia and the other oil
states. The Shiites, who were persecuted under Hussein’s secular state,
make up 60 percent of the Iraqi population and are the likeliest
beneficiaries of a truly democratic election.

These complex Middle East realities help explain why national security
adviser Brent Scowcroft and other members of George H.W. Bush’s
administration opposed George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq. Unlike the
neo-conservative ideologues of this administration, the older
pragmatists saw the dangers that the younger Bush was setting in motion
by exaggerating the threat from Hussein’s weapons and falsely linking
him to the Sept. 11 attacks.

When Iraqi population didn’t welcome the invading U.S. troops with rose
petals last year and the WMD stockpiles didn’t materialize, it quickly
became clear to many pragmatists that the younger Bush had marched the
United States into a geopolitical trap. The end result would either be a
costly and bloody occupation or a strategic victory for bin Laden or
possibly both.

Civil War Fears

Complicating the picture even more, CIA analysts are now warning about
the rising prospects for civil war in Iraq.

Ethnic violence is spreading in the north, where Iraq’s Kurdish minority
fears renewed persecution and loss of autonomy under a new Iraqi
government. Kurds, Turkmens and Arabs have clashed in the city of
Kirkuk, with Kurdish gunfire killing two demonstrators in a march by
Arabs and Turkmens on Dec. 31. Within a week, unknown gunmen had killed
three Kurds. Kurdish political parties now want to expel 270,000 Iraqi
Arabs from Tamim province as part of a plan to annex the region for a
future autonomous zone. [Washington Post, Jan. 23, 2004]

In central Iraq, Sunni Muslims, who enjoyed privileges under Hussein,
also worry about what the future holds. They are afraid that Hussein’s
repression of the Shiites could now lead to Shiite retaliation against
the Sunnis, who have taken the lead in resisting the U.S. occupation.

Beyond the worsening political chaos, the war against the U.S.
occupation shows no signs of abating, despite the Bush administration’s
hopeful predictions that Saddam Hussein’s capture was the beginning of
the end for the resistance. American soldiers continue to die on a daily
basis as do Iraqis accused of collaborating with the occupation. Though
many Iraqis work with the occupation authorities out of economic
necessity, they are still marked for assassination.

Despite Bush’s positive progress report in the State of the Union
speech, it’s increasingly difficult to envision how Bush’s strategy of
using Iraq as a model for pro-U.S. governments throughout the Middle
East is supposed to work.

To many early critics of the U.S. invasion, the predictability of the
emerging disaster was one reason they urged caution. Few doubted that
the U.S. military could crush Iraq’s outgunned army, but what was less
clear was how Iraq’s 25 million people would react once tens of
thousands of Americans were occupying the country.

Instead of dealing with these realities, however, the Bush
administration and its allies chose to bully the critics with charges of
disloyalty, while frightening the American people with dire warnings
about Iraq’s WMD being shared with Islamic terrorists.

As the major U.S. news outlets scrambled to wrap themselves in the
American flag and “prove their patriotism,” Bush’s WMD claims underwent
little serious scrutiny and war fever soon overwhelmed the remaining
voices of caution. Americans who didn’t go along were sneered at as
“dupes” and “traitors,” while longtime U.S. allies urging restraint were
mocked as the “axis of weasels” and saw their products boycotted by
Americans.

While not all the dire predictions that critics made about the
consequences of a U.S. invasion – such as the prospect of 500,000
civilian casualties spelled out in an internal UN report – have come to
pass, other forecasts have played out more or less as predicted.

The ethnic and religious power struggle now unfolding was predicted. So
was the guerilla insurgency. Anti-war organizations, in particular,
warned that many Iraqis would see the U.S. presence as an occupation,
not a liberation. The Iraqi people have a long, proud history of
resisting colonial occupation, such as their victory over the British
Empire in 1920.

There were also concerns about what the invasion would mean for regional
and global security. Retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, who served as a Middle
East peace envoy for Bush, warned in October 2002 that by invading Iraq,
“we are about to do something that will ignite a fuse in this region
that we will rue the day we ever started.”

Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser in the first Bush
administration, said a strike on Iraq “could unleash an Armageddon in
the Middle East.” Former South African President Nelson Mandela warned
that the U.S. was “introducing chaos into international affairs.” But
George W. Bush brushed these warnings aside.

Changed Minds

Ironically, many of those who pounded the drums of war in 2003 were
among the skeptics about marching to Baghdad at the end of the first
Persian Gulf War in 1991.

Gen. Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
recognized the pitfalls of ousting Saddam Hussein and trying to
transform Iraq. “There is this sort of romantic notion that if Saddam
Hussein got hit by a bus tomorrow, some Jeffersonian democrat is waiting
in the wings to hold popular elections,” Powell said in 1992. “You’re
going to get – guess what – probably another Saddam Hussein.”

Powell said the American people would be “outraged if we had gone on to
Baghdad and we found ourselves in Baghdad with American soldiers
patrolling the streets two years later still looking for Jefferson.”

In 1998, George H.W. Bush and Scowcroft collaborated on an article
published in Time magazine entitled “Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam” in 1991.

“Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation
of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives
in midstream, engaging in ‘mission creep,’ and would have incurred
incalculable human and political costs,” Bush and Scowcroft wrote. “We
would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The
coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in
anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances,
furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for
handling aggression in the post-cold war world.”

The elder Bush and Scowcroft also recognized the damage a march to
Baghdad would have done to the larger goal of international cooperation.
They wrote: “Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding
the UN's mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international
response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion
route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a
bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different – and
perhaps barren – outcome.”

Even influential neo-conservatives, who pressed for the 2003 invasion,
offered different advice in the early 1990s.

Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, William Kristol and Robert Kagan – all of
whom backed the invasion of Iraq in 2003 – supported the first Bush
administration’s caution in 1991. Pipes, director of the Middle East
Forum, a think tank devoted to “promoting American interests in the
Middle East,” warned in 1991 that, “getting rid of Saddam increases the
prospects of Iraqi civil war, Iranian and Syrian expansionism, Kurdish
irredentism and Turkish instability.” Pipes added, “Do we really want to
open this can of worms?”

A decade later, following the line of the rest of the neo-conservative
movement, Pipes dismissed similar warnings as alarmist. “The risks are
overrated,” he said. “It's in our interests that they modernize and it's
in our interests to help them modernize and I think we know how.” He
cited past U.S. nation-building in Germany and Japan after World War II.

International Law a la Carte

Without explicitly admitting failure, some of the war hawks now
implicitly concede that the Iraq mission is not going too well.

The Bush administration had ridiculed the United Nations as an
irrelevant “debating society” and a “chatterbox on the Hudson.” Now,
Bush is going hat in hand to the world body to get its help in Iraq.
Bush is asking the UN to decide how political power should be handed
over to the Iraqis. Still, Bush continues to assert that the U.S. has a
unilateral right to take whatever action it sees fit, with or without
international support.

In his State of the Union address, Bush said he would never seek a
“permission slip” when protecting U.S. security. So Bush was still
saying the U.S. doesn’t need UN approval before invading countries.

Bush also continued to insist that the invasion of Iraq was justified by
his desire to enforce UN resolutions, even though the UN had refused to
endorse the invasion. “Had we failed to act,” Bush said, “Security
Council resolutions on Iraq would have been revealed as empty threats,
weakening the United Nations and encouraging defiance by dictators
around the world.”

Yet, by acting outside the UN Charter and invading a member state that
had not attacked or threatened the U.S., Bush arguably had weakened UN
authority more than any other world leader during the UN’s half century
of existence.

Furthermore, it’s now apparent that Iraq wasn’t defying the UN over
weapons of mass destruction, though Bush continues to say so.

Twice publicly, Bush has falsely asserted that the invasion was
justified because Hussein had refused to let weapons inspectors return
to Iraq, when the reality is that Hussein not only let the inspectors in
but gave them free rein to search the country for banned weapons.

In July 2003, Bush said, “we gave him a chance to allow the inspectors
in, and he wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable
request, we decided to remove him from power, along with other nations,
so as to make sure he was not a threat to the United States and our
friends and allies in the region.” [For details, see the White House Web
site.]

Bush repeated this false claim on Jan. 27, when he said, “I hoped the
international community would take care of him. I was hoping the United
Nations would enforce its resolutions, one of many. And then we went to
the United Nations, of course, and got an overwhelming resolution --
1441 -- unanimous resolution, that said to Saddam, you must disclose and
destroy your weapons programs, which obviously meant the world felt he
had such programs. He chose defiance. It was his choice to make, and he
did not let us in.”

Bush’s delusions also are not his alone. On Jan. 25, Sen. Pat Roberts,
R-Kan., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, tried to defend
the WMD rationale for the invasion by positing the question, “If in fact
[Saddam] didn't have them, why on earth didn't he let the U.N.
inspectors in and avoid the war?”

WMD Hunt

In reality, Hussein did let the inspectors in as a way to avoid war. He
also let them examine any sites they wished. His reasoning for
cooperation again seems obvious: he knew they weren’t going to find
anything. Once allowed into Iraq, the inspectors never complained about
a lack of access to sites, including many where U.S. intelligence
believed weapons might be stored.

Chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix did voice concerns about Iraq's
accounting for past weapons, but he stressed that those shortcomings
didn’t mean the weapons existed. Blix sought more time for UN inspectors
to complete their work, but Bush cut the search short by pressing ahead
with his invasion.

In his State of the Union address and other recent comments, Bush has
sought to rewrite the history. Though it’s now clear that Iraq had
largely disarmed, Bush said that “12 years of diplomacy” hadn’t
succeeded in eliminating the country’s alleged WMD stockpiles. However,
David Kay, the longtime Iraq war hawk who resigned his position as the
head of the Iraq Survey Group on Jan. 23, said “I don’t think they

existed.”

“What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of
the last [1991] Gulf War, and I don't think there was a large-scale
production program in the '90s,” Kay said. He also reported that
President Bill Clinton’s 1998 bombing campaign against Iraq had
destroyed much of the remaining infrastructure in Iraq's chemical
weapons programs.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, who told the UN in February 2003 that
there was no doubt that Iraq was hiding vast WMD stockpiles, also has
conceded that the accuracy of his presentation is now in doubt. “The
answer to that question is, we don't know yet,” Powell told reporters.

Free Pass

A year ago, when the Bush administration’s certainty about WMD deserved
some questioning, few in the U.S. news media and the political
establishment were willing to do much asking.

Bush officials generally got a free pass when making unsubstantiated
claims about “reconstituted” nuclear programs and the “grave and
gathering danger” that Iraq supposedly presented to U.S. security. The
brave few who questioned the assertions were ridiculed and, in some
cases, silenced.

MSNBC, for instance, canceled Phil Donahue’s program, which dared to
raise some questions about the justification for war. The removal of
Donahue and the elimination of other war skeptics was widely interpreted
as a move to better position the network to compete with Fox News.

On the U.S. all-news cable networks, Hussein’s possession of WMD was
taken as a certainty. The rare skeptic who was let on faced incredulous
or hostile questions from anchors.

Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, a former U.S. Marine and
self-identified “card-carrying Republican,” was one those few who
questioned the administration’s WMD claims. Ritter, who had performed
detailed inspections of Iraqi weapons programs, maintained that no
weapons of mass destruction existed and that Iraq didn’t have the
capability to produce them.

"The Bush administration has provided the American public with little
more than rhetorically laced speculation," Ritter said in July 2002.
"There has been nothing in the way of substantive fact presented that
makes the case that Iraq possesses these weapons or has links to
international terror, that Iraq poses a threat to the United States of
America worthy of war."

Former UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq Dennis Halliday also called
into question many of the administration’s claims, and particularly the
idea that Iraq posed a threat to the United States or Iraq’s neighbors.
“The Europeans have asked for some kind of concrete evidence showing
that he [Hussein] is producing WMDs, but no one can produce any
evidence,” Halliday said in March 2002. He said the weapons inspections
issue was “really just a ruse” and that the Bush administration’s goal
was always regime change.

Contradictions

U.S. intelligence agencies also were contradicting the administration’s
certainty about WMD, finding the data far from conclusive.

In September 2002, for instance, Bush went to the UN to begin his public
campaign to win international support for invading Iraq. “Iraq has
stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the
facilities used to make more of those weapons,” Bush said. Later that
month, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld testified to the House Armed
Services Committee that Hussein’s regime “has amassed large clandestine
stockpiles of chemical weapons, including VX and sarin and mustard gas.”

But in September 2002, the Defense Intelligence Agency determined that
“There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and
stockpiling chemical weapons, or whether Iraq has – or will – establish
its chemical warfare production facilities.”

Even when the UN weapons inspectors were on the ground in Iraq, scouring
the country for illicit weapons and coming up empty-handed, few were
willing to openly ponder the possibility that Iraq’s government was
telling the truth, and that it was the Bush administration that was lying.

After Iraq produced an 11,800 page dossier in December 2002, documenting
its side of the WMD dispute, the U.S. edited out 8,000 pages before
passing it on to other Security Council members. The Bush administration
then cited Iraqi “omissions” as evidence of “material breach” of
Security Council resolution 1441. The U.S. never bothered to present its
evidence of Iraqi omissions, but simply maintained that U.S.
intelligence knew of Iraqi activities that were not included in the

dossier.

During the UN inspections, the Bush administration said it knew about
specific Iraqi stockpiles and precisely where they were. But as chief
inspector Blix later said, none of the pre-war intelligence from the
United Kingdom and the United States helped locate any secret Iraqi
weapons. The Bush administration’s Orwellian spin was that the failure
of the inspectors to find evidence of WMD was further proof that Iraq
was hiding something.

Congress wasn’t much better than the U.S. news media. In July 2002, the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, then headed by Democrat Joe Biden of
Delaware, opened one-sided hearings on the threat Iraq allegedly posed
to the United States and the need to take pre-emptive action against the
country. The witness list read like a who’s who of Iraqi exiles, U.S.
military figures and think tank intellectuals, virtually all of them
supporting the case against Iraq.

Typical was the testimony of Khidir Hamza, a former Iraqi nuclear
engineer, who claimed that Iraq possessed more than 10 tons of uranium
and one ton of slightly enriched uranium, and could have enough
weapons-grade uranium to produce three nuclear weapons within three years.

Nothing Iraq could do, even submitting to intrusive UN inspections,
would be enough to counter such claims. On March 20, 2003, the United
States led an invasion of Iraq in violation of international law and
against the wishes of scores of world leaders.

Now, with thousands of Iraqis dead, more than 500 U.S. soldiers killed,
Iraq’s infrastructure decimated, national treasures looted, the country
on the verge of civil war, Bush’s chief weapons inspector resigning and
the hunt for WMDs all but called off, Bush says the war was justified on
“humanitarian” grounds. Bush cites Saddam Hussein’s past crimes and his
capture as reason enough for war.

Again, however, a few voices have been raised to dispute this latest war
rationale. Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s leading human rights
groups, issued a report arguing that historical crimes cannot justify an
invasion, which involves more death and destruction. “Despite the
horrors of Saddam Hussein’s rule, the invasion of Iraq cannot be
justified as a humanitarian intervention,” Human Rights Watch said.

The organization has in the past advocated humanitarian intervention,
but only to stop ongoing genocides in places such as Rwanda and Bosnia,
not to remove a ruler when a human rights catastrophe was not occurring.

‘Dangerous Fantasies’

The Bush administration’s recurring separation from reality has led some
to wonder if it suffers from a kind of “psychosis.” Hans von Sponeck,
former UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, pondered this possibility
while commenting about Bush’s State of the Union speech during an
interview on the radio program “Democracy Now.”

“My immediate reaction is that there is truly a frightening disconnect
between the rhetoric of President Bush and the reality, as it exists, as
we see it, as you know it, as we know it in Europe, as the Iraqis know
it, the reality outside the White House,” von Sponeck said. “I would say
that President Bush's assessment of that reality is really deeply,
deeply flawed. One is presented with facts which really are fantasies,
very, very dangerous fantasies. One wonders whether there is an element
of psychosis here in the White House.”

Von Sponeck said Bush’s failure to deal with the real world extends to
his understanding of the present political situation in Iraq and what is
signified when 100,000 people march through the streets of Baghdad
demanding “free elections, not forced selections.” Also, von Sponeck
said Bush is lacking realism when he insists that the Iraqi insurgency
consists of “only a few remnants of a thug called Saddam Hussein, and
foreign terrorists.” To the contrary, von Sponeck said, “the anger is
widespread. And it's getting wider and wider every day.”

Very few members of the U.S. political or media establishments seem
willing to draw the obvious conclusion: that the Bush administration
either lied repeatedly to justify the invasion of Iraq or that top
officials of the U.S. government are living in a fantasy world.

Both options pose hard questions for the press, the politicians and the
American people -- and it’s not clear which option is more frightening.