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Thu. May 13, 2004

Iraq Roundup, Sans Venting

I’m still in the quiet mode on Iraq right now. It’s too infuriating to write about. But thankfully, I don’t have to write much in order to string together some quotes that resonated pretty strongly with me, taken from several articles you might find enlightening. Or infuriating. Or both. They emit a certain tone that’s becoming more and more common, one that ought to scare the bejesus out of Rove & Co., because of the direction from which it’s coming.

Your body and your head will be returned home to your family.

Your father, at the bottom of a pit of grief that no imagination can conjure, will blame the President of the United States for your death. He will be right.

In time he will come to know that the agents of your death were those for whom any American or Jew can only be seen as a thing fit to be slaughtered as quickly and painfully as possible. For now, however, it is enough that your father blames the President of the United States. And he will be right.

Your President, passing a group of microphones on the warm green lawn of the White House, will pause and state that the men who killed you will be found and “brought to justice.” He will be lying.

As long as the President and those about him decide, for whatever reasons, to bind the hands of our military for their political gain, there is no chance that the men who took your life will be found and brought to justice. Men who perform these crimes should not be “brought” to justice. Instead, justice should be brought to them swiftly and without remorse. And not to them only, but to all those who support, hide, and empower them. This, for political reasons, will not happen now. For now, the promise of “justice” from this President is hollow.

Your family will mourn you forever.

Your death will go unavenged.

Gerard Van der Leun: “Invitation to the Beheading of an American Jew”

It’s easy to be “quiet” about Gerard’s words. Because I couldn’t add anything anyway. Lee Harris makes a similar point about the false “promise of justice.”

It is often said that we are fighting a war of ideas. We are not. We are fighting a war of images, and right now our enemy is winning this war, while we are losing it, and losing it badly.

Consider the images that have worked their way into our collective mind since the beginning of April: the images of the massacre at Fallujah; the images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib; the images of the decapitation of an American civilian. Now compare the overwhelming intensity of these images with the “idea” that the Bush administration is invoking in order to fight against them, namely, the abstract ideal of justice.

First, the Bush administration pledged to “bring to justice” those who committed the massacre at Fallujah; then it pledged to “bring to justice” those who were responsible for the prison abuse; and now, it has pledged to “bring to justice” the men who videotaped the killing of Nick Berg. How can such an abstract idea hold its own against such vividly concrete images? How can the pledge of due process hope to exorcise the searing memory of a severed head held aloft in triumph?

Lee Harris: “The War of Images”

This column from George Will is a couple days old, but fits the general tone I mentioned above, and oddly foreshadows what’s to come from Thomas Friedman:

When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate. Leave aside the question of who or what failed before Sept. 11, 2001. But who lost his or her job because the president’s 2003 State of the Union address gave currency to a fraud – the story of Iraq’s attempting to buy uranium in Niger? Or because the primary and only sufficient reason for waging preemptive war – weapons of mass destruction – was largely spurious? Or because postwar planning, from failure to anticipate the initial looting to today’s insufficient force levels, has been botched? Failures are multiplying because of choices for which no one seems accountable.

Americans are almost certainly going to die in violence made worse in Iraq, and not only there, by the substantial aid some Americans, in their torture of Iraqi prisoners, have given to our enemies in this war. And by the appallingly dilatory response to the certain torture and probable murder committed in that prison.

George F. Will: “No Flinching From the Facts“

And Thomas Friedman wonders if “we have any chance of succeeding at regime change in Iraq without regime change here at home?“

“Hey, Friedman, why are you bringing politics into this all of a sudden? You’re the guy who always said that producing a decent outcome in Iraq was of such overriding importance to the country that it had to be kept above politics.”

Yes, that’s true. I still believe that. My mistake was thinking that the Bush team believed it, too. I thought the administration would have to do the right things in Iraq — from prewar planning and putting in enough troops to dismissing the secretary of defense for incompetence — because surely this was the most important thing for the president and the country. But I was wrong. There is something even more important to the Bush crowd than getting Iraq right, and that’s getting re-elected and staying loyal to the conservative base to do so. It has always been more important for the Bush folks to defeat liberals at home than Baathists abroad.

I admit, I’m a little slow. Because I tried to think about something as deadly serious as Iraq, and the post- 9/11 world, in a nonpartisan fashion — as Joe Biden, John McCain and Dick Lugar did — I assumed the Bush officials were doing the same. I was wrong. They were always so slow to change course because confronting their mistakes didn’t just involve confronting reality, but their own politics.

Thomas Friedman: “Dancing Alone”

And finally, I leave you with revealing news about that Private who still feels she did nothing wrong, and only appeared to be having fun in photos because she was ordered to pose for them; an article with the tabloid title “Leash Gal’s Sex Pix”:

Shocking shots of sexcapades involving Pfc. Lynndie England were among the hundreds of X-rated photos and videos from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal shown to lawmakers in a top-secret Capitol conference room yesterday.

“She was having sex with numerous partners. It appeared to be consensual,” said a lawmaker who saw the photos.

And, videos showed the disgraced soldier – made notorious in a photo showing her holding a leash looped around an Iraqi prisoner’s neck – engaged in graphic sex acts with other soldiers in front of Iraqi prisoners, Pentagon officials told NBC Nightly News.

“Almost everybody was naked all the time,” another lawmaker said.

Many members of Congress left the 45-minute viewing session early, thereby missing the porno performance by England, but there were enough other images of torture, humiliation and intimidation to sicken anyone.

Before the pictures of England’s sex romps were shown to Congress, the 21-year-old reservist from West Virginia tried to portray herself as a reluctant participant who was just following orders.

“I didn’t really, I mean, want to be in any pictures,” England told a Denver TV station.

England acknowledged “it was kind of weird” when she was photographed smiling, with a cigarette in her mouth, as she leaned forward and pointed at the genitals of a naked, hooded Iraqi at Abu Ghraib prison.

NY Post: “Leash Gal’s Sex Pix”

And that’s it for this session of [mostly] vent-free links. And another day without my head exploding.