Congress must end U.S. role in a civil war nobody voted for That is why we propose to end the authorization for the war in Iraq. The civil war we have on our hands in Iraq is not our fight and it is not the fight Congress authorized. Iraq is at war with itself and American troops are caught in the middle.

This is as clear a statement of collective avoidance of causal responsibility. "We removed a vicious dictator, now the rest is up to the Iraqis" seems to be the theme of the Iraq war opposition in the US. What I have yet to see is an admission of responsibility for the current state and a clear statement of how the US proposes to clean up the mess. Keeping troops in Iraq probably won't do that but long-term financial assistance with no strings attached might. But for some reason troop withdrawal seems to be an end in itself. This an interesting example of what symbolic interactionists called collective action. Group values and patterns of behavior are confirmed through every discursive act and an individual's collective belonging is defined through replicating these acts - whether consciously or subconsciously. It is, of course, possible that taking actual responsibility for the chaos in Iraq is not an obvious thing and I'm not being realistic, but it seems to me that somebody would come up with it, at least as a "bad" option, and collective values negotiation is my only explanation for why that hasn't happened.