Since Richard A. Clarke’s fifteen minutes, I haven’t had much to say about political affairs of any kind. That is probably because I am busy, and even more so because I am confused. My thoughts concerning the recent events are hard to sort, and I’m not ready to make any simple conclusions. It is too easy to say that Rummy’s a boob, Bush is too, we’ve no place in Iraq – and that the recent crop of headlines and photographs are just further evidence to support each of those statements. It is also just as easy to say “Saddam was clearly a bad man,” and to then justify all things even slightly related to his removal. Both sentiments are popular (at least among the people I know), but anyone who arrives at either of these dim conclusions is nothing more than lazy and broken in their thought.
However, the recent string of events does call for some valid questions. For me, even if the photos of American soldiers doing as they please to prisoners of war is somehow compliant with a loophole or two of the Geneva code, and even if the torture those photos describe elicited the type of information that ends insurgencies and wins terror-wars, I firmly believe that in today’s world, the mere existence of those photographs undermines the best of reasons for the American occupation of Iraq. If we as a human race have established that Saddam alone did very terrible things, what does it mean when there are photos of at least a half-dozen of Iraq’s liberators doing a few terrible things of their own. I think it means a lot, especially to those who live outside American borders. I think it means that even if we have a righteous reason to turn that country upside down, we will never be able to prove it – those photos and the story they accompany are the body blow in the psychological battle that the United States and its allies are about to lose.
I’ve always sort of liked Donald Rumsfeld. I appreciate the fact that he is a realist, and he seems to consider what he is going to say and how he will say it in public, and as he is saying it – something his boss doesn’t know how to do. I doubt what transpired comes close to representing his personal intentions, but even if he alone spelled out the need for sexual abuse in his own policies – I don’t really care, the blame game isn’t important. What matters is that the rest of the world can rest assured that they were right when they assumed that the righteously God-fearin’ cowboys that felt a “calling” to bring justice to all corners of the world are creatures just as sick and twisted as anyone else. The conservative Americans driving their kids all over suburbia with bumper stickers commanding the driver behind them (that can’t see anything but their Suburban) to “Support Our Troops!” should take the time to consider that “our troops” may be great guys who love the American Way, but they are not the Army Adorned. Mr. Rumsfeld has done about as good a job of taking “full responsiblity” for what has happened as any man looking to keep his job can do. But I am troubled by one of his most definitive statements, which is at the heart of his aplogy and which describes the crux of this current problem. He called these acts “fundamentally un-American”, and I am saddened by the fact that not one lawmaker hearing his testimony thought to say that he was dead wrong on that fact alone. These acts may have been fundamentally wrong – but to start believing that Americans by their nature represent all that is right is a fundamental mistake, and a dark, serious kind of Wrong.
The sad part is that although the war effort may be visibly flawed and undermined at this point, it is startling to realize what could have been. The recent events and their documentation have been brought to our attention by the nature of the media, and the use of technology in both the media and our military. Maybe I’m a pessimist, but I don’t doubt that American soldiers participated in some altogether horrible acts along the hard road to Hitler. But we all know how that worked out, and how different the world and its systems of communication, documentation, and knowledge were then. The news wasn’t quick, and it wasn’t even close to 24 hours a day. Cameras weren’t in nearly every pocket like they are now, and the populace was informed in a different way, to a different extent. We thank our lucky stars for the ways those elements of life have changed, but today’s constant stream of news makes me wonder if we’ve gotten too much. If we believe in such a thing as a just war; a war that despite its cost in money, life, and filth provides humanity with an escape from something worse – we have to ask ourselves if we will ever be able to stop such an evil, should it arise. Maybe I’m caught in the moment, but it seems we are crawling just a bit closer to the white noise that will render the actions, motives, and speech of any given man meaningless, foul, and indecipherable from his counterparts. Our eyes and ears will grow numb as we let it ring, and some will call it freedom.
Tags: politics