The anti-Bush crowd’s view of the war in Iraq was driven home to
me by an AOL News headline on May 8 that read “More Bad News Coming
on Iraq for Bush.” According to some in the American news media,
the disclosure of more photos of naked Iraqi prisoners being
taunted by American soldiers isn’t bad news for America; it’s bad
news for Bush.
Liberals in general seem to have been able to convince
themselves that America is not at war. Bush is at war. Therefore,
Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, and the like feel free to make
comments to the world press declaring that Iraq is a quagmire,
George Bush’s Vietnam, confident that they are not undermining an
American war effort, but merely undermining George Bush.
To many of the leaders of the Democratic Party, it seems that
the most searing episode in the American experience recently was
not September 11 (any allusion to which by the President in
anything close to a political context is “disgusting”) but Abu
Ghraib. The Democrats brought on Wesley Clark to deliver the
Democratic response to the President’s weekly radio address to call
the abuse of the Saddam loyalists and terrorists at Abu Ghraib the
result of faulty leadership by President Bush. John Kerry has had
no compunction about “politicizing” this matter, making it the main
point of many recent campaign appearances and insisting that Bush
take personal responsibility. In their lusty frenzy to try to take
advantage of this “political opening” the Democratic Party leaders
who brought us the Paul Wellstone memorial service/pep rally
probably do not realize they have gone over the edge. They don’t
seem to realize that the rest of the country is not quite so eager
to pillory the President personally over this issue.
American politicians of all stripes have been falling over
themselves to condemn what occurred at Abu Ghraib. Americans like
to forgive and to ask forgiveness whenever our people do something
shameful. And that, of course, is better than the alternative we
see in much of the rest of the world, particularly in the Middle
East. But we shouldn’t let a little guilt allow things to get too
out of hand. It is stupefying, for instance, how often we have been
treated to the rank idiocy of statements about the “haunting
similarity” between Abu Ghraib and the Nazi death camps — and not
just by the usual kooks on the anti-American far Left.
Showing the moderation and responsibility that ensured his
failure in the Democratic primaries, Senator Lieberman commented
during Donald Rumsfeld’s Senate testimony that we should keep in
mind that we have yet to receive an apology for the murder of 3,000
people on September 11 or for the killings of Americans in Iraq
trying to bring security and services to the people of that nation
(some, undoubtedly at the hands of some of those Abu Ghraib
inmates). Don’t hold your breath, senator.
The news media report to us that residents of Fallujah are proud
that their townsfolk killed those four American security guards but
that that pride is tempered by shame about the desecration of their
bodies. That is, in and of itself, interesting. They are proud to
kill people who are providing security to work crews trying to
build schools, water treatment plants, and electrical facilities,
but are ashamed at the mutilation of their bodies. No apology,
though. And they certainly weren’t willing to give the miscreants
up to the authorities. The insurgents in Fallujah also had no
problem using innocent civilians as “human shields,” knowing full
well that the American soldiers have a lot more respect for Iraqi
lives than they do.
Arab governments and the Arab press that expressed no outrage at
Saddam Hussein’s torture chambers, rape rooms, and mass graves,
have, of course, found a lot of outrage to express about the
treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib by Americans. These are
the same Arab governments and Arab media that accuse the United
States of not being “even-handed” in our dealings trying to broker
peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. The fact is, as
honestly appalled as we may be at what happened at Abu Ghraib, we
shouldn’t be too concerned that most Arab leaders and most of the
Arab press (and, indeed, most Arabs) aren’t mollified by American
contriteness or an apology by George Bush or Don Rumsfeld. After
all, since at least 1948, most Arab governments have constantly fed
their people with the line that nearly all their problems are the
result of the Jews and/or the Americans.
Many (if not most) Arab governments and the bulk of the Arab
media want America to fail in Iraq. Therefore, that’s what is going
to determine their reaction to anything that happens there. They
are not interested in being even-handed. They aren’t going to look
at facts. They aren’t going to put things in perspective. They just
want America to lose.
The Iraqi people, however, are a bit more pragmatic. Most know
that an American failure in Iraq will be bad for them, and they are
willing to tolerate (and even welcome, if secretly) the American
presence. A large majority of Iraqis continually tell pollsters
that they want the so-called “army of occupation” to stick around
for a while. Most Iraqis are not thrilled at the prospect of being
ruled by the “proud” thugs of Fallujah or by al-Sadr’s Mahdi
militia. And that is what counts.
In the long run, pictures of naked Iraqis forming a human
pyramid for the amusement of a few American guards are not going to
be what shapes Middle Eastern attitudes towards the United States.
In the long run, Arab attitudes will be shaped by whether America
wins or losses in Iraq — and that means whether or not Iraq
becomes a stable society with a representative government and a
free press.
The challenges to our success in Iraq are manifest. But so are
our achievements (despite the paucity of such reporting by American
news organizations that too often view our efforts in narrow
partisan terms). If we succeed in Iraq, the victory will be far
more than George Bush’s. It will be a victory for the United
States, and indeed, for the civilized world. As fervently as Bush’s
critics demanded to hear his apology over Abu Ghraib, it would be
nice to hear John Kerry acknowledge that simple fact, firmly and
unambiguously.
