QandO

May 05, 2004

WaPo: It's all America's fault!
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OK, I know I said I wasn't going to be able to blog much, but I found this hidden away in the "Style" section of the Washington Post. The Style section of all places. It's by Philip Kennicot, a WaPo Staff writer. Phil has been looking at the whole Abu Ghraib situation and offers us his very deep thoughts.

Among the corrosive lies a nation at war tells itself…

You know, when the very first sentence of your little article starts off this way, it's pretty obvious what direction you're headed. I mean, we can already make an educated guess about what this guy's gonna say, can't we?

Among the corrosive lies a nation at war tells itself is that the glory -- the lofty goals announced beforehand, the victories, the liberation of the oppressed -- belongs to the country as a whole; but the failure -- the accidents, the uncounted civilian dead, the crimes and atrocities -- is always exceptional. Noble goals flow naturally from a noble people; the occasional act of barbarity is always the work of individuals, unaccountable, confusing and indigestible to the national conscience. This kind of thinking was widely in evidence among military and political leaders after the emergence of pictures documenting American abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison. These photographs do not capture the soul of America, they argued. They are aberrant.

Naturally, Mr. Kennicot thinks otherwise. He is not, you'll notice, asking any important questions. Do the authorities in America routinely abuse prisoners? When such abuses happen, are they dismissed as trivial when they are revealed? These questions are central to Mr. Kennicot's thesis, but he doesn't ask them.

An important measure of a society's values is what it condemns, both socially through ostracism or shame for minor offenses against its values, and legally by criminal prosecution for more serious offenses. Arab Muslim countries routinely use torture and abuse as a matter of policy. In the United States, we prosecute and jail abusive police officers and prison guards at the state level. Additionally, we expose them to federal civil rights prosecutions for the same acts. Then, of course, they are liable to civil action for damages from those they harmed.

To me, it seems the fact that we criminalize such behavior, condemn it, and prosecute it means that the abhorrence of abuse is one of our central cultural values. Mr. Kennicot seems to believe otherwise.

An Army investigative report reveals…

Mr. Kennicot seems delightfully unaware of the implications of this phrase. Notice, please, that it does not say, "A UN report reveals…", or "An Amnesty International report reveals…" It is an Army investigative report.

The US Army, despite it's deeply-seated wish to brutalize Iraqi prisoners (due, no doubt, to its comic-book, John Wayne culture, as John Kerry put it many years ago), has somehow, for completely mystifying reasons, investigated the allegations of brutality, publicly reported on those findings, and is now taking criminal action against those accused of wrongdoing.

On top of that, the report inexplicably singles out for public commendation soldiers who've violated the canons of the Army's culture by refusing to participate in these abuses, and reporting them to the chain of command. A chain of command, by the way, that went so completely out of the Army's control that it instituted a criminal investigation to look into the allegations.

Where will the madness end?

Mr. Kennicot seems not to have asked himself, "If the Army has investigated itself, publicly exposed wrongdoing, and has begun the process of criminal punishment of the malefactors, then isn't that a more powerful statement about the Army's—and the country's—values than the fact that all soldiers do not comport themselves with perfect behavior at all times?"

But, that seems like a fairly important question to me.

An Army investigative report reveals that we have stripped young men (whom we purported to liberate) of their clothing and their dignity; we have forced them to make pyramids of flesh, as if they were children; we have made them masturbate in front of their captors and cameras; forced them to simulate sexual acts; threatened prisoners with rape and sodomized at least one; beaten them; and turned dogs upon them.

The American leaders' response is a mixture of public disgust, and a good deal of resentment that they have, through these images, lost control of the ultimate image of the war. All the right people have pronounced themselves, sickened, outraged, speechless. But listen more closely. "And it's really a shame that just a handful can besmirch maybe the reputations of hundreds of thousands of our soldiers and sailors, airmen and Marines. . . . " said Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Sunday.

Reputation, image, perception. The problem, it seems, isn't so much the abuse of the prisoners, because we will get to the bottom of that and, of course, we're not really like that. The problem is our reputation. Our soldiers' reputations. Our national self-image. These photos, we insist, are not us.

But these photos are us. Yes, they are the acts of individuals (though the scandal widens, as scandals almost inevitably do, and the military's own internal report calls the abuse "systemic"). But armies are made of individuals. Nations are made up of individuals. Great national crimes begin with the acts of misguided individuals; and no matter how many people are held directly accountable for these crimes, we are, collectively, responsible for what these individuals have done. We live in a democracy. Every errant smart bomb, every dead civilian, every sodomized prisoner, is ours.

Ah. I see. So, we bear a collective responsibility. Funny, that's the same arguments the Russians made at Nuremberg. All Germans are guilty, collectively. Therefore they should all be punished. By that reasoning, we are all guilty in some way of murder, bank robbery, arson, muggings, and various and sundry other crimes, because, every day, someone commits those crimes in America.

This is one of the great lies of the Left, that society is sick and twisted, and that the evil that men do is a result of the corrupting influence of society, not because people are equally capable of good and evil, and are personally responsible for the choices they make. The poor, for example, commit crimes because they are poor, and victims of society's injustices.

Although, one notes, the Left doesn't similarly argue that possessing wealth makes one more spiritually noble. Odd, that. If lack of money makes one prone to criminality, why doesn't the abundance of money make one virtuous? But, I digress.

The key argument is that we are, at the same time, collectively responsible for everything that any one of us does, but individually responsible for none of them. It's the corrupting influence of society that makes us do it.

This was stupidity on toast when Rousseau came up with the idea 200 years ago, and it hasn't gotten any less stupid in the two centuries since.

One thing is strange, though. It may all be society's fault, but Mr. Kennicot wants these Army cowboys strung up.

This also brings up another interesting question. If Mr. Kennicot's standard is correct, then couldn't I declare that, since the 9/11 hijackers were Muslims, it proves that an inclination toward terrorism is inherent in Islam? Don't Muslims, by Mr. Kennicot's reasoning, have a collective responsibility for terrorism? And if so, shouldn't we watch all Muslims especially closely at, say, airports? If not, why not?

I'm joking of course. High standards like that only apply to the West. The Left implicitly believes that Third-Worlders are too benighted to live up to them. Although, the Left still has enough good sense not to simply refer to them as "bloody wogs" and be done with it.

Gotta keep up that image of "compassion".

These photos show us what we may become, as occupation continues, anger and resentment grows and costs spiral. There's nothing surprising in this. These pictures are pictures of colonial behavior, the demeaning of occupied people, the insult to local tradition, the humiliation of the vanquished. They are unexceptional. In different forms, they could be pictures of the Dutch brutalizing the Indonesians; the French brutalizing the Algerians; the Belgians brutalizing the people of the Congo.

Yet, oddly enough, in the incidents described in this paragraph, Mr. Kennicot seems not to notice that Belgian depredations in the Congo, or French transgressions in Algeria were condoned by their governments at the time. Yet, in this case, we are prosecuting the offenders, and doing so as much pour encourager les autres, as we are for reasons of justice. That is not a subtle distinction, yet it appears to be completely beyond Mr. Kennicot's ability to fathom.

Look at these images closely and you realize that they can't just be the random accidents of war, or the strange, inexplicable perversity of a few bad seeds. First of all, they exist.

I suspect that Mr. Kennicot has a post-graduate degree. Because usually, it takes more than four years of indoctrination at the college level to compress so much stupidity into two sentences. This is Master's Degree stupidity. If he doesn't already have one, somebody at Columbia or Brown needs to start the paperwork for his honorary post-grad sheepskin immediately.

His argument is essentially, "if something happened, it can't be aberrant. It must be a fundamental flaw." Well, that's a pretty loose standard.

So, then, by Mr. Kennicot's reasoning—and I use the term "reasoning" extremely loosely—if I bought a new Mercedes and found that the radiator hose was leaking, it must mean that German automobiles are crap. After all, a leaky hose can't be an aberration, because it happened. There must be a fundamental bias against quality control among German carmakers. And, you know those Germans; lackadaisical and lazy to the core. Hardly more than buffoons, really, when it comes to complicated machinery.

Next week's column from Mr. Kennicot: "My cell phone dropped a call while I was visiting Annapolis. Verizon must be destroyed!"

Is it an accident that the man in the hood, arms held out as if on a cross, looks so uncannily like something out of the Spanish Inquisition? That they have the feel of history in them, a long, buried, ugly history of religious aggression and discrimination?

No, it is not an accident at all. American enlisted soldiers, with their marvelous high-school educations, are keen students of history. Indeed, it is a little known-fact that Army enlisted soldiers write monographs about Savonarola, Phillip II, Tomas Torquemada, and, oddly enough, Cardinal Richelieu in their spare time.

Thanks to their encyclopedic knowledge of the Spanish inquisition, the picture to which Mr. Kennicot refers was staged by a couple of Privates First Class and a Specialist were able to meticulously choreograph a scene from the 1564 trial of Gil Tibobil de Bonneville in Toledo. They did require the assistance of a Corporal who was an expert in the El Baratillo brotherhood of Seville, however, in order to get the hood just right.

World editorial reaction is vehement. We are under the suspicion of the International Red Cross and Amnesty International. "US military power will be seen for what it is, a behemoth with the response speed of a muscle-bound ox and the limited understanding of a mouse," said Saudi Arabia's English language Arab News.

Ah, yes, the vitally incisive views of the Arab world's free press. Please repeat the phrase "Arab world's free press" until you can do so without lapsing into giggles at the phrase's oxymoronic asininity.

So, the Arab News says bad things about us. Indeed, they are saying almost precisely what Mr. Kennicot is. So, one wonders, does that make the Arab News a reasonable source of opinion, or Mr. Kennicot a crank?

If I was a betting man, I can tell you where I'd put my money.

We reduce Iraqis to hapless victims of a cheap porn flick; they reduce our cherished, respected military to a hybrid beast, big, stupid, senseless.

Except, when "we" do it, it's a crime. When "they" do it, it's policy.

I love that "we", though. He's made the assertion without any rational argumentation that "we" are responsible, then proceeds as if it's proved. It has kind of a ring to it, though, doesn't it?

"I shouted out, 'Who killed the Kennedys!'
When, after all, it was you and me…"

"We", you see.

Are we decivilized yet? Are we brutes yet? Of course not, say our leaders.

And, right up to the day that actions like those at Abu Ghraib stop incurring universal condemnation and criminal punishments, they'll be absolutely right.

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