Of all the mistakes that the Bush administration has committed in Iraq, none is as gratuitous and self-inflicted as the bungling of the trial of Saddam Hussein.
Although Hussein deserves to be shot like a dog -- or, same thing, like the Ceausescus -- we nonetheless decided to give him a trial.
This charming passage highlights the core inconsistency at the crux of our effort in Iraq, the real reason we are failing there. It is because our rhetoric about why we are in Iraq and what we are trying to accomplish is squarely and transparently contradicted by our actions, and just about everyone -- including those in the Middle East -- realizes this.
Pro-war advocates now tout as the primary justification for the war the fact that we are liberating Iraqis and importing to that country and to the Middle East high-minded American values and respect for human rights which will change the region for the better.
But these same advocates stridently urge the U.S. to engage in tactics which are the very antithesis of the elevated and civilized values which they claim we are importing to Iraq. They want more torture, secret detentions, death squads, summary executions, and, now, an embrace of the "principle" that certain human beings have relinquished their status as human and are to be treated as something less -- in Krauthammer's formulation, "like a dog."
Krauthammer is not the first to urge that we treat Iraqis like "dogs." Pro-war advocates love to piously dismiss the grotesque abuses of Abu Grahib as some sort of isolated aberration, the work of some psychotic lone wolf grunts who one day woke up and decided to put naked prisoners on leashes for fun. But the incredibly self-destructive abuses there were motivated by the precise depravity underlying Krauthammer's column -- the view that it's time we stopped treating human beings as humans and started treating them like dogs:
Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, the former commander of military police at Abu Ghraib prison, says she was told by a higher-ranking military intelligence commander that Iraqi prisoners should be treated "like dogs." In an interview with the BBC, Karpinski said Major General Geoffrey Miller -- who ran the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and is now in charge of prisons in Iraq -- told her, "they are like dogs, and if you allow them to believe at any point they are more than a dog then you've lost control of them."
Policies expressly mandating that people be treated like dogs, pro-war advocates urging that individuals be summarily shot like dogs, naked Iraqis crawling around on the floor with a leash. This canine view of Iraqis has become our Iraq strategy, and if pro-war cretins like the ostensibly respectable Krauthammer have their way, the kennel will only grow and the dog-care standards will worsen.
There is a quite reasonable argument to make that behaviors which are otherwise unacceptable become acceptable in order to win a war. "All's fair in love and war," and all of that. But what we are doing in Iraq is not supposed to be like other wars, according to the people who are responsible for its being waged. The aim of this war is not conquest or even direct self-defense; it is about effectuating a transformation of values in the Middle East.
For too long, the Middle East has been plagued, we are told, by soul-smothering dictators who oppressed their populations through their use of authoritarian tactics such as torture, secret detentions, summary executions, and a complete disregard of even basic precepts of human rights. They are evil, so this reasoning goes, because they have treated their citizens not as human beings, but as dogs. We need to rid the region of those tactics, and to do so, we need to start using the same tactics ourselves. To describe this approach is to illustrate its core corruption -- not just its moral and intellectual corruption, but its practical stupidity.
Even if one wants to adopt some sort of cartoonish macho posture by waiving off moral concerns about U.S. values as being the province of effete, whiny subversives, it is the height of self-destruction to adopt that posture for a war which is supposedly devoted to the teaching and spreading of exactly those values.
A war which is waged in order to establish civilized values and human rights but which is waged in direct contradiction to those values is, by definition, a war that is doomed, indeed is a war that is designed, to fail.
When Robert McNamara, Defense Secretary from 1960-1968, released his mea culpa Vietnam book in 1995, a panel was convened at Harvard to hear him speak (h/t commenter Hypatia). One of the panelists was Tom Vallely, a Silver Star-winning Marine who served in Vietnam from 1968 to 1970. This is what he said about why the U.S. lost:
I, like many veterans, and I'm sure there are some here tonight, went to Vietnam as young men because we wanted to be like the generation before us who joined the American military to fight wars that did good.
The Second World War stopped fascism and ended imperialism of Japan and Asia, and it was assumed that when America went to war, it went to do good. But, if you use all the technology that was at my fingertips as a radio operator in Vietnam, and if you were brought up a Catholic, as I was, and learned when the state was wrong you should resist and speak out, whether it be in Poland or in the United States, and if you bombed villages with children in them, you burn their houses, see prisoners given over to the South Vietnamese to be killed for fun, values were the problem. Our intentions were good. Our values became confused, lost and that's why they won.
But, ironically Vietnam has helped us learn for the first time that we can do wrong, and sometimes even evil when our intentions were good. Our true understanding of this can make us a stronger country, and help us limit future mistakes.
All the retrospectives about Vietnam don't seem to have accomplished much. Here we are in the middle of a war ostensibly devoted to the "winning the hearts and minds" platutide, and what we hear most loudly are reports of growing government-sponsored Shiite death squards, and calls from pro-war advocates for more torture, summary executions and treating Iraqis like dogs. Are there any mistakes that we made in Vietnam which we are not making in Iraq?
Maybe we can put down dog bowls on the floor for Saddam and his co-defendants and have them drink from them with their tonuges during breaks.
ReplyDeleteThen we can throw toys across the room and make them fetch them with their mouths and waterboard them if they don't.
That'll show Muslims our true nature and what human rights really means.
What, you mean you don't think it is spreading democracy to put naked people on leashes and shock their balls and "interrogate" them until they croak and abduct them to black prisons?
ReplyDeleteWhat the fuck is wrong with you. We are teaching people about freedom and human rights. How can we do that if we don't crack some skulls?
Glenn, while your comparisons of Iraq to Vietnam evince a lot of diligent research, the reality is, it is not that original -- leftists and their minions in the media have been applying Vietnam to foreign policy ever since they developed the grossly distorted narrative of that war as it took place. You are not a leftist, and are not remotely anti-American; but your penchant for making the perfect the enemy of the good feeds those who are.To quote from and link to the '81 remarks of a journalist who covered Vietnam, and who saw 25 years ago how it is now forever now to be used (my emphasis):
ReplyDelete"Viet Nam" has become not merely an invidious comparison but a magical incantation. The woolly-minded need only declare vehemently that El Salvador is already—or could become—"another Viet Nam" for the enterprise to be condemned and, probably, blighted. Throughout the Western world, commentators and reporters have invoked the specter of Viet Nam to arouse detestation of a Washington initiative. That rush of the journalistic lemmings includes not only the heavyweights of the media but many cartoonists and, as well, humorists like Art Buchwald and Russell Baker, whose satire is often striking and effective. Prominent among the lemmings are television personalities like Jon Snow of Britain's ITV, who recently presented one film "report" that continually cut from vaguely delineated political and military developments to heart-rending scenes in a refugee camp. In that and a drum beat of subsequent "reports" the conclusion was not implied but hammered home time and again: U.S. policy was, presumably by direct intention, rendering tens of thousands homeless and killing hundreds of women and children. El Salvador, the viewer could not but conclude, was a deliberate replication of Viet Nam. And "Viet Nam" had become synonymous with absolute evil—practiced, of course, by the United States.
The "Viet Nam Syndrome" is compounded of a variety of symptoms, none unique in itself, but unprecedented in combination and devastating in their totality. Wars have been badly reported in the past. Facts have been mis-stated, and their interpretation has been biased. Emotions have been deliberately inflamed, and reporters have ridden to fame on waves of misrepresentation. But never before Viet Nam had the collective policy of the media—no less stringent term will serve—sought by graphic and unremitting distortion the victory of the enemies of the correspondents' own side. Television coverage was, of course, new in its intensity and repetitiveness; it was crucial in shifting the emphasis from fact to emotion. And television will play the same role in future conflicts—on the Western side, of course. It will not and cannot expose the crimes of an enemy who is too shrewd to allow the cameras free play.
As long as the "Viet Nam Syndrome" afflicts the media, it seems to me that it will be virtually impossible for the West to conduct an effective foreign policy. It is apparently irrelevant that the expectations of paradise after Hanoi's victory evoked by "the critics of the American war" became the purgatory the Indochinese people have suffered. Just as many denizens of the antebellum American South did not know that "Damyankee" was really two words, an entire generation in Europe and the United States behaves as if "the dirty, immoral war in Viet Nam" were an irrefutable and inseparable dogma. Merely equate El Salvador (or any other American intervention) to Viet Nam—and not only the American public but all "liberal" Europeans will condemn it without reservation. That is all they need to know. In its final effect—what has over the last decade been called "the paralysis of political will"—it will make it especially difficult for the United States to honor any political commitment anywhere in the world where small and threatened nations may expect American support for their independent existence. Before they fall to an aggressor, they will have been victimized by "the Viet Nam Syndrome."
Do read the entirety of How to Lose A War: The Press and Viet Nam By Robert ElegantReprinted from Encounter (London), vol. LVII, No. 2, August 1981, pp. 73-90 What many cheerleaders in your comments are arguing -- precipitous withdrawal from Iraq -- would for that nation ratify Elegant's analysis that Vietnam Syndrome generates "'the paralysis of political will'—it will make it especially difficult for the United States to honor any political commitment anywhere in the world where small and threatened nations may expect American support for their independent existence. Before they fall to an aggressor, they will have been victimized by 'the Viet Nam Syndrome.'"
I am deeply skeptical that the war in Iraq is going extremely badly, and that it is essentially lost -- tho I suppose all the optimistic military bloggers, and troops I have personally spoken with and who are deeply critical of the MSM, could be lying or deluded. I do not believe that Shia "death squads" are condoned and are not being and will not be reined in -- even some Jews, immediately after WWII, committed atrocities on captured Nazis. (Expecting victims of indescribable torture and mass murder to immediately upon liberation behave like civil libertarian saints is, to understate, unrealistic.) I do not believe that the U.S. is torturing Iraqi prisoners of war or sending them to black prisons, at least not as standard operating procedure -- what may be being done to suspected terrorists is another issue. It will be decades before we know, due to necessarily classified nature of the information, whether terrorists have yielded plot information under immoral interrogation protocols.
If the military told troops that the Ba'athists they would be imprisoning were dogs, they were accurate. Just as it is accurate to say that the SS were scum. From that it does not follow that they should be summarily executed, and I would strenuously object to that, and in fact, repudiate Krauthammer on the subject of a trial for Saddam. However, during WWII some beastly prescriptions were applied to the Japanese, too, but the fundamental hostility to the Japanese enemy was nevertheless correct. (I'd infinitely rather be an Arab-American in the U.S. now than a Japanese-American here in the '40s. -- we have, in fact, made some moral progress.)
Plainly put: I do not trust, and see no reason to trust, media sources on the alleged crimes of the United States. Nor their assessment of the (purported) lack of progress in Iraq. Been there, done that, to riff on your theme.