Month: February 2012

For those of you who collect words, I came across a new one (well, new to me) the other day: anosognosia. It is a neurological term, defined as a condition in which a person who suffers from a disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her disability.

David Dunning, a Cornell professor of social psychology, gives this example: “An anosognosic patient who is paralyzed simply does not know that he is paralyzed.  If you put a pencil in front of them and ask them to pick up the pencil in front of their left hand they won’t do it.  And you ask them why, and they’ll say, “Well, I’m tired,” or “I don’t need a pencil.”  They literally aren’t alerted to their own paralysis.  There is some monitoring system on the right side of the brain that has been damaged, as well as the damage that’s related to the paralysis on the left side.”

First published in Ariga, March 8, 2003.

The US Administration’s goals for the looming war with Iraq have inflated as the months have passed. First it was disarmament, then regime change (plus disarmament, of course; these things are cumulative), then freedom for the Iraqi people and finally a new dawn for the entire Middle East.

Laudable aims all. But a new Middle East is not what the Security Council had in mind when it passed Resolution 1441. Either Bush is making it up as he goes along – adding new inducements as the previous ones fail to galvanize the world into his kind of action – or, and this is the scary part, he is revealing, bit by bit, the full dimensions of a long-held master plan.