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From the "first time for everything" file:
I pretty much endorse and agree with the spirit (if not the
execution) of this
column by Ann Coulter. It's silly to single out George W
Bush's inauguration for accusations of excess in the face of
recent loss of life in far-flung corners of the globe. Just as
silly is the incongruity between reactions to the Boxing Day
tsunami and the 1991 cyclone in Bangladesh, which killed some
138,000 people. It was on January 5th, when the official death
toll was at 155,000, that German Chancellor Gerhard
Schroeder called the tsunami "the biggest natural
disaster in recent human memory." And it was, albeit with a
scant 17,000 dead people lead over an event that had occurred
only thirteen years earlier — an event that nobody remembers.
Only 29 years ago, an earthquake in China killed somewhere
between 240,000 and 650,000 people. I was vaguely aware of it.
This proves nothing except that perception is
everything. Bush and his advisors, it seems to me — and their
supporters in the media even more so — have steadfastly
refused to accept that political principle, preferring instead
to heap scorn upon those they believe are responsible for
incorrect perceptions. And this is widely viewed as a good
thing: "Seldom," wrote
Robert Fulford of Bush's second inaugural speech, "has
idealism been so firmly and persuasively linked to
self-interest."
One need look no further than Abu Ghraib to see what
I mean. Those
photos speak for themselves, I think everyone can agree:
American soldiers perpetrated grisly, sadistic attacks on
citizens of a country to which they came as liberators. Whether
the photos speak sufficiently for themselves was, and is,
a matter of considerable debate. It was widely considered
relevant, for instance, that Saddam had done
far worse. A random sampling:
·
Robert
D. Alt: "…the systematic torture of… countless…
men in Abu Ghraib and the 300,000 Iraqis in mass graves have
proven less newsworthy than the ultra vires acts of a few American soldiers who abused Iraqi
detainees. Perhaps this is because the world holds America to a
higher standard — to a standard we proclaimed at our
inception."
·
Mark
Steyn: "If [Bush] wanted to apologize, he should have
apologized to Ahmed bin Jihad, or whoever the fellow in the dog
collar is, and left it at that… It's ridiculous to insist that
America has to apologize to Arab thugocracies in which what's
merely simulated in those photographs is done for real every day
of the week."
·
Elizabeth
Nickson (scroll down to May 16, 2004 12:24pm): "In
every country in the Middle East and in southeast Asia, and in
most countries in Africa, prisoner abuse is so much worse than
what happened at Abu Ghraib that there is literally no basis for
comparison."
·
Jonah
Goldberg: "[The] uproar from these pictures drowns out
all other messages, explanations, and journalistic 'context'.
Lost is the fact that in America torturers get punished, while
in the Arab world they get promotions. Huge percentages of Arabs
are illiterate, which means these pictures will tell the whole
story, particularly in the hands of the vilely anti-American
Arab media."
And on it went. Goldberg's comments, in particular,
intrigue me. What's "the whole story" for hooded
electrode man? If he was unlucky enough to have been
imprisoned by both Saddam and by the Americans, then I suppose
he might have cracked a smile at the superior treatment he was
receiving, but that seems unlikely. In that the events depicted
in those photos actually transpired, surely those photos are
the whole story… or
at least a whole
story. (A brilliant
exhibit at the International Center for Photography in New
York, entitled "Inconvenient Evidence," presented
medium-quality printouts of the photos, on plain white paper,
against a plain white wall. It drove this point home bluntly:
that divorced of "context" is probably the only truly
valid way to view images such as these.)
And yet, "context" was coming from
all directions, and in nearly every case it seemed to imply that
the transgressions were (or might be) less serious than they
were being presented. Here's
Colby Cosh: "it would now be downright un-American, one
suspects, to ask who the people in these photos are, exactly,
and what they might have done to invite such treatment. Why, for
example, does one of the prisoners… have the word 'RAPIST'
drawn on one leg?" Well, let's assume the prisoner was a
rapist. How does a rapist go about "inviting" being
stacked in a pyramid of naked men, or being hooded and having
his genitals attached to electrodes, or having dogs set upon him
for the amusement of his captors? The short answer is by raping
someone (i.e., the wrong person) in Iran, or Syria, or North
Korea — countries where prison guards are given free reign to
indulge their basest urges.
The United States is now, tragically but deservedly,
on that list. Sitting here, I know that the United States is a
superior country in every way to Iran, Syria and North Korea,
and that Abu Ghraib was an isolated incident. The legal and
moral failures there are as plain as day, and they are being
dealt with. But it is both inevitable and, I think, entirely
fair that these events have further damaged the United States'
reputation in the Middle East — not just because their media is
biased and their education systems are staffed by anti-American
and anti-Jew crazies, but because of that "higher
standard" thing that Robert Alt identified in the National
Review. Bush prides himself on idealism, and his supporters
laud him for it, but an idealist response to an event like Abu
Ghraib must necessarily be accompanied by a pragmatic,
self-effacing response. In short, it must be handled in a way
that best benefits the future of Iraq.
"Inconvenient evidence" will continue to
arrive, after all. What, for instance, do you do about this
photo, and this
one, and this
one, and — ugh, heads up — this
one? I don't think there's anything concrete you can do. They
are what they are. But look at the Getty Images caption:
"U.S. troops mistakenly kill Iraqi civilians."
"Now hold on a minute!" you might very
well say. "'Mistakenly' isn't quite right."
"Well, who killed these people?" a
hypothetical product of a Middle Eastern education might ask.
"Well, U.S. troops, but…"
"And were they armed?"
"No, but…"
Unfortunately, no one wants to hear the buts.
Because they initiated this mess, the Americans
have to deal with that, maybe even with complex sentences, or
periodic displays of weakness, or admissions of mistakes, even
if they think it compromises their principles. I suspect that
Bush is incapable of such nuance, and his top advisors seem
trained to suppress any inclination thereto. They strike me as
unwilling to wage any battle they don't think they ought to be
obliged to fight. I could speculate that it's a fundamentalist
Christian thing, but ultimately the "why" isn't nearly
as important as the "when is it going to change?"
I think Charles
Krauthammer nailed it best:
We think of torture as the kind
that Saddam practiced: pain, mutilation, maiming and ultimately
death. We think of it as having a political purpose:
intimidation, political control, confession and subjugation.
What happened at Abu Ghraib was entirely different. It was
gratuitous sexual abuse, perversion for its own sake.
That is what made it, ironically and disastrously, a
pictorial representation of precisely the lunatic fantasies that
the jihadists believe — and that cynical secular regimes such
as Egypt and the Palestinian Authority peddle to pacify their
populations and deflect their anger and frustrations. Through
this lens, Abu Ghraib is an "I told you so" played out
in an Arab capital, recorded on film.
And Bush, because of his swagger, his moral
reductivism, and no doubt also because of his Christianity, has
become the perfect figurehead for the Arab Street's monstrous
misconceptions of America. At this point, I don't honestly know
how you fight that, but this is not the point at which a plan
for doing so should have been drawn up. Not only were Bush and Co. not
prepared to combat the inevitably, insanely negative spin
that the Arab media and extremist clerics and the like would put
on every deed and misdeed perpetrated by its troops, but they
don't even seem willing to do so now. The Arab media are
foaming at the mouth with anti-American and anti-Jewish
sentiment; the clerics are even crazier. You can't kill them
all. So… what are you going to do? This is the type of
question I'd like the leader of the free world to be able to
answer.
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