I know I said I wasn’t going to keep hammering at this Abu Ghraib thing, but the Internet is awash in commentary on the subject and I’m finding a lot of thought-provoking material out there. If you’re interested in this subject, please read on for some quotes and links; otherwise, I invite you to come back later.
I’m not surprised that everyone out there is pretty unhappy with the reports of Iraqi prisoner abuse, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum, but I’m fascinated by the way this one issue appears to represent some kind of tipping point in how many people view the Iraq War, or, more specifically, how they view the Bush Administration’s handling of the war. I’m not just speaking of liberals or anti-war types. From my reading of various blogs and on-line magazines, it seems that even a lot of hawks are using words like “mismanagement” and “incompetence.”
Take Andrew Sullivan, for instance. This guy has been as pro-Iraqi invasion as you can get. He believed in the WMDs and he believed that removing Saddam — which he calls “an unalloyed good” — would kick off a kind of democratic domino effect in the region. I think he also believes in President Bush, or at least wants to, but this scandal has shaken his faith badly, as he tries to explain in this recent stream-of-consciousness post on his blog. He says he still stands by the decision to invade Iraq, but just barely. In his own words, “I cannot deny that the terrible mismanagement of the post-war – something that no reasonable person can now ignore – has, perhaps fatally, wrecked the mission. But does it make the case for war in retrospect invalid? My tentative answer – and this is a blog, written day by day and hour by hour, not a carefully collected summary of my views – is yes, I still would have supported the war. But only just. And whether the ‘just’ turns into a ‘no’ depends on how we deal with the huge challenge now in front of us.”
Later in this same entry, Sullivan continues, “it was worth trying. It was vital to reverse the Islamist narrative that pitted American values against Muslim dignity. The reason Abu Ghraib is such a catastrophe is that it has destroyed this narrative. It has turned the image of this war into the war that the America-hating left always said it was: a brutal, imperialist, racist occupation, designed to humiliate another culture. Abu Ghraib is Noam Chomsky’s narrative turned into images more stunning, more damaging, more powerful than a million polemics from Ted Rall or Susan Sontag. It is Osama’s dream propaganda coup. It is Chirac’s fantasy of vindication. It is Tony Blair’s nightmare. And, whether they are directly responsible or not, the people who ran this war are answerable to America, to America’s allies, to Iraq, for the astonishing setback we have now encountered on their watch.”
On the other end of the spectrum, liberal Josh Marshall calls this situation “a self-inflicted wound” in one of his many posts on this subject. In another post, he discusses his reading of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) report on prison conditions in Iraq and concludes “that this [mistreatment] wasn’t a matter of a breakdown of authority or rogue sadists (though those were probably in the mix too) but rather a matter of organized policy.” He writes at length on why he believes this, and it’s worth reading his argument even if you don’t accept it.
Falling somewhere in the middle of the spectrum is one of my favorite bloggers, the always-readable and thoughtful John Scalzi, who, like Sullivan, supported the removal of Saddam but has been disgusted by what has happened since then. Scalzi’s take on this situation can be found about three posts down from the top of his page (last time I checked anyway), and is largely summed up in the following excerpt:
“Whether one believes that deposing Saddam was a good thing or not, our armed forces have given the enemies of the United States the evidence they need to posit a moral equivalency between us and him, regardless of whether it is true. We have no one to blame for this but ourselves: If one does not wish to be compared to a brutal dictator who crushed and tortured the Iraqi people, one should not, in fact, crush and torture Iraqis in that brutal dictator’s most infamous prison. …There’s a word for this sort of thing: Incompetence, and that word sticks to just about everything this current administration has done in Iraq from the moment our forces stabbed into Baghdad. The military offensive was bold and brilliantly done; the occupation of the country has been utterly abysmal, and everything about it seems to have been designed to squander what good will we accrued by freeing the country from Saddam’s grip. This could have been a ‘good war’ — not an easy war — had our administration showed some indication that it actually cared what happened to Iraq and the people within it once Saddam was kicked out of power. But it didn’t, and to a large extent still doesn’t — which is not entirely surprising to me since I personally never believed that George Bush had any interest in invading Iraq except to avenge his father. I had hoped that those around him might show some evidence of long-term thinking once Dubya’s limited objective had been accomplished, but I guess I was wrong about that.”
Meanwhile, columnist Paul Krugman says that something like the Abu Ghraib scandal was inevitable given the Bush Administration’s insistence on operating in secret, which Krugman compares to Nixon’s “just trust us” attitude.
Finally, I was especially moved by the outrage and heartbreak expressed by a blogger called Arkhangel, a former military man who views the situation through the unique lens of someone who has been in the trenches. A few days ago, when this story was first breaking, Arkhangel wrote that “there is no honor” in Secretary Rumsfeld’s insincere acceptance of responsibility for this mess, then says that in his opinion, there is no good deed that can make up for this wrong. He says, “But what of the schools? What of all the good we’ve done there? So what? Does it make the horrors we’ve seen, and those we’ve yet to see any more excusable? Is this what Republican morality is all about? Getting an extramarital blowjob in the Oval Office is a national crisis, but you can abuse and torment all the Iraqis you want–just make sure you build them 2,000 schools to make up for it.”
In a more recent post, he continues, “The events of the past year–to include the horrors at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, but let’s not stop there–have dealt the concept of America as a moral power a staggering blow. And while it wouldn’t be excusable if we had something to show for it (some things just aren’t worth that high a price, I think), we don’t. All we have to show for it is an increasingly Pyrrhic triumph in Iraq. [Howard] Dean was right–we are no safer than we were on September 10, and we are further than ever from victory.
“And while there are some members of the governing party who are beginning–only now–to criticize, ever so gently, the President, there are many, many more who are patriots to party rather than patriots to America. Yes, Mr. DeLay, and the rest of the House GOP, I’m looking at you. Save for a few exceptions (Heather Wilson comes to mind), they are so enthralled with power that they are sacrificing our national honor upon that squalid altar.
“Which brings to me this. In the Good Book that these apostles of righteousness are so fond of, there comes a passage when Jesus says: ‘What doth it profit a man if he gains the world, if in doing so he loses his soul?'”
As for my own evolving take on this developing story, I feel some sense of validation because so many others share my thoughts about the public-relations damage that this has done to America and our cause. Unlike some on the left, however, I take no real pleasure in the misfortune of the Bush Administration. Despite my avowed desire to see Bush and Cheney put out to pasture, I would rather that they’d succeeded in Iraq beyond everyone’s wildest dreams than screw everything up (as I believe they’ve done). At least the fighting would’ve been over relatively quickly and with a minimal loss of life on all sides, and America would still still be looking like the force for good that we all want to believe it is. As it is, Bush and Co. have started something that will take years, if not decades, to finish, and there will be no easy way out.
Some people are now saying that the game is over and are suggesting that we withdraw immediately. That would solve nothing. Even if Iraq didn’t dissolve into a genocidal orgy after we left, our withdrawal would make Americans look like the pansy paper-tigers that Osama bin Laden says we are, and that would only encourage him and his ilk. The inevitability, the inescapability of this situation fills me with a sense of grim resignation, like a guy whose buddy picks a fight in a bar. You don’t want to fight, you think your buddy was a dumbass for telling those sailors they looked like pansies in their little white suits, but you can’t just turn your back on him now that the bottles are flying. And so you take your beating and feel like a dumbass yourself for allowing it to happen.
I honestly don’t know where we should go from here, or how we should start rebuilding our credibility. My instincts tell me that a good first step would be to do some major house-cleaning, to show the rest of the world that we’re serious about what happened at Abu Ghraib. That means that sincere apologies should be made, jobs should be lost, and jail-time, if appropriate, should be allotted. And I’m not just talking about the seven or eight Army grunts who appear in the incriminating photographs.
No one in politics these days on either the left or the right is willing to say, “I screwed up,” and accept whatever consequences come with that admission. I truly believe a lot of problems could be solved if everyone would just be willing to accept responsibility for their actions and/or policies. That means that Secretary Rumsfeld should resign, if the Abu Ghraib buck does, indeed, stop with him. If he had authority over the Army prison system and if his policies in any way contributed to what happened, either by sanctioning the abuse or simply by setting up conditions that allowed it to happen (such as by requiring improperly trained and inexperienced soldiers to serve as guards and interrogators), then he needs to fall on his sword and Bush needs to let him do it. Bush, in fact, should ask him to do it, for the good of the Iraq mission and for the good of the country. I haven’t decided yet if it is appropriate for Rumsfeld to lose his job over this, but I think he and Bush both need to be more open to that option than they so far appear to be.
