May 12, 2004
IT IS A WAR:
Beheading Adds New Twist to Scandal (Howard Kurtz, May 12, 2004, Washington Post)
The murderers changed the subject yesterday.Just when the frenzy over American mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners was spinning out of control, we got a reminder of what we're up against.
The pictures (with the really bad stuff still to be released, we're told) of prisoners being sexually humiliated and led around with dog leashes has shaken the Bush administration to its core. But the videotaped beheading of an American contractor, posted on what's being called an "al-Qaeda-linked Web site," is something else entirely: The calling card of brutal killers who delight in murdering innocents, as the world learned anew on 9/11.
Suddenly, everything was put into perspective.
(Did the networks have to play the gruesome video, except for the final act, thus handing the terrorists the propaganda victory they wanted? A still shot, a snippet, and a description wouldn't have been enough?)
If this was an old-fashioned propaganda war, this sickening decapitation tape would never have been released, since it trumps a story that was making the United States look very bad. But these killers don't care about that, or apparently about human life itself. So they've succeeded in making the American abuses--for which the president has apologized, and which is being investigated, and courts-martial convened--small by comparison.
This comes as "60 Minutes II" prepares tonight to show video of a young American soldier saying she doesn't care that two Iraqi prisoners have died--which otherwise would have been the day's big story.
Instead, it's all about what New York Post headlines are calling "savages" and "barbarians."
There is already an undercurrent out there that the media are at fault for publicizing these pictures--that they whipped up a storm, embarrassed America and perhaps led to yesterday's killing. Oklahoma Rep. James Inhofe, for example, says he is "outraged" by the press on this matter.
This seems a case of the media and Democrat elite's badly misunderstanding the American people. Sure, we'd rather there weren't pictures of bare naked Iraqis, but no one much minds a little brisk treatment of the enemy. If it was okay with us to go over there and shoot them, what makes people think we'll get all hot and bothered about letting dogs snarl at them?
MORE:
Senator 'Outraged at Outrage' in Iraq Prison Case (Deborah Zabarenko, May 11, 2004, Reuters)
As others condemned the reported abuse of Iraqi prisoners, U.S. Sen. James Inhofe expressed outrage at the outcry over the scandal and took aim at "humanitarian do-gooders" investigating American troops. [...]"I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment," Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican and an outspoken conservative, told a U.S. Senate hearing probing the case.
In heated remarks at odds with others on the Senate Armed Services Committee who criticized the U.S. military's handling of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, Inhofe said American sympathies should lie with U.S. troops.
"I am also outraged that we have so many humanitarian do-gooders right now crawling all over these prisons looking for human rights violations, while our troops, our heroes are fighting and dying," he said.
"These prisoners, you know they're not there for traffic violations," said Inhofe, whose senatorial Web site describes him as an advocate of "Oklahoma values."
"If they're in cellblock 1-A or 1-B, these prisoners, they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands and here we're so concerned about the treatment of those individuals."
-The Right's Abu Ghraib Denial:
Is the liberal outrage really worse than the torture? (Timothy Noah, May 11, 2004, Slate)
Conservative Abu Ghraib denial reached its crudest expression today, at a Senate hearing, when Sen. James Inhofe, R., Okla., pronounced, "I'm probably not the only one up at this table that is more outraged by the outrage than we are by the treatment. … I am also outraged that we have so many humanitarian do-gooders right now crawling all over these prisons looking for human rights violations, while our troops, our heroes are fighting and dying."Posted by Orrin Judd at May 12, 2004 1:41 PMDeny though it may, the right can't avoid forever any engagement with the ugly things that happened at Abu Ghraib. It will have to grapple with what the prison guards did and what made them do it.
"The pictures ... [have] shaken the Bush administration to its core."
At some point the Democrats, anti-war Left and various other Copperheads are going to have to realize that after almost four years, there's not going to be some sort of magic event that causes the Bush Administration to collapse like the Soviet Union. They are unwilling to put in the hard effort to come up with, and present in a coherent manner, and fight for, a positive program for which they will be rewarded with power, instead opting for the attitude of the lottery ticket buyer who believes that they really, really are going to get rich that way.
Mr. Ortega;
It's not that they won't, it's that they can't. The basic worldview that informs the Left these days is based on logo-realism, the idea that words are more important than deeds, that action is simply fluff over the central reality of social concensus. It is inherent to this view to search for the magic words that will change the political situation. To believe in the efficacy of patient action for incremental improvement is to become a conservative.
Maybe I'm a cold SOB, but I don't really understand the mindset of these people who are so outraged about some isolated abuse of some terrorist prisoners of war. We all wish unpleasant things like this didn't happen, but they do, don't they? Always have, always will. And so why the outrage?
It's pointless, like White Liberal Guilt.
All it tells me is that some people are too naive - or blinded by ideology while assuming others are naive enough to buy their b.s. - to have worthy opinions about war. Period. Many of them, sadly, are employed in journalism.
Pssssst! It's not 1968, and we aren't fighting in Vietnam! Pass it on!
Jim Dunnigan of Strategy Page has a good analysis here. He sticks to facts and explains things concisely. What a concept.
Posted by: Jeff Brokaw at May 12, 2004 2:43 PMThe Abu Ghraib photos - so far - aren't much different from what you can see on COPS or Jerry Springer on any given day.
Let's not even go into what happens inside our own prisons here at home.
Posted by: M. Murcek at May 12, 2004 2:51 PMHas Timothy Noah come to grips yet with the fact that George Bush has not sold out the Kurds? Or is he still in denial?
Timothy Noah has much more to "grapple" with than does the right.
Posted by: h-man at May 12, 2004 2:53 PM>The Abu Ghraib photos - so far - aren't much
>different from what you can see on COPS or Jerry
>Springer on any given day.
I've heard them described as
1) "Stills from Madonna's next music video",
2) "An NEA-funded Performance Art piece", and
3) "A Mapplethorpe photo shoot gone very wrong".
I am a right winger. and Mr. Noah, frankly, I don't give a damn. I thought the pictures that I have seen were funny. The soldiers who took them should be told that they should not take pictures and will be punished administratively. But, the whole thing does not amount to a hill of beans.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at May 12, 2004 5:52 PMAt some point, can't we start having a discussion about whether these tactics were effective?
Wouldn't the shame of simulated homosexual photos being shown to one's family or tribe be an effective non-torture way of extracting information from a muslim? It would work on me and I'm not even a muslim.
I think I read somewhere that an American general dealing with a muslim insurgency in the Philippines (turn of the 20th century after the Spanish-American War) threatened do bury all muslim insurgents killed in pig's blood, either preventing their passage to paradise or sending them to hell. I think it worked.
Posted by: Matt C at May 12, 2004 6:14 PMBlack Jack Pershing, only the story isn't true.
Not a bad idea, though.
When I cautioned against giving hostages to fortune, that knife cuts two ways.
Plenty of time for plenty of worms to turn between now and November.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at May 12, 2004 6:55 PMNow that the shock of Sept. 11 has almost completely worn off on the partisan Democrats in the country, nothing as piddling as a mere videotaped beheading is going to change their world outlook. Only another 9/11 attack after several years of a Democratic presidency -- i.e., far enough away so that it couldn't be blamed on Bush or any future Republican president -- will produce any reexamination of those beliefs. But that's only because they would see it as a personal attack on their hold on power, as opposed to an attack on America as a whole.
Michael Moore's post-9/11 screed on why the terrorists didn't attack a Red state instead of a Blue one pretty much sums up the way many on the left no doubt felt, but were circumspect enough not to say at the time. Why were the terrorists attacking them? They didn't vote for Bush.
This assumes al Qaida should have been watching Inside Politics with Judy Woodruff to get their political bearings straight before they launched their attacks. It will take something like a dirty bomb atttack on a Blue state three years into a Kerry administration to convince people like Moore (or to a lesser extent Noah) that the terrorists are non-partisan in their targets and don't really care what the current president's stances are on U.N. resolutions about peacekeeping forces or rattification of the Kyoto treaty.
I watched the hearings in which Sen. Inhofe spoke, and it seems that there's even LESS to this "Prisoner Torture" tale than appears - Just a bunch of under-trained, poorly led yahoos free-lancing for some MI civilian contractors.
Posted by: Michael Herdegen at May 13, 2004 1:00 AMJohn,
There are not a lot of high profile targets in the red counties; most population concentrations are blue. The collectivist mentality that resides in the alimentary canal of the progressive left will prevail as their reality.
Someone should produce Michael Moore toilet paper. He probably would had he thought about it. Ted Rall sanitary napkins might also be a seller.
Posted by: genecis at May 13, 2004 9:27 AMgenesis --
Moore's unstated point in the days after 9/11 was, "Why didn't the fly planes into Reunion Tower in Dallas or Pennzoil Plaza in Houston?" Since Texas would be the obvious Red state target.
Given the recent reports of people scouting out the refinery areas east of Houston, if any terrorist attack occurs there, we might even get an "It's about time they got their targets straight" blovation from Mr. Moore.
Posted by: John at May 13, 2004 9:49 AM>The collectivist mentality that resides in the
>alimentary canal of the progressive left will
>prevail as their reality.
Remember, the Flat Earth Society is still around.
"The Village that voted the Earth was flat,
Flat as your hat,
Flatter than that..." -- Rudyard Kipling