Back to the Blogosphere

Excuse the long absence and the long rant. I meant to announce my absence in advance, before my move last week, but our Internet service was cut before I expected. I just bought my first house, and since then have been single-handedly helping Home Depot and Lowe’s meet their quarterly sales estimates. Last week was full of heavy lifting, moving, painting, cutting, chiseling, sanding, drywalling, prying, painting, and of course, shopping.

Like many of you, I’ve been in a deep funk about the Abu Ghraib shame. It’s already been blogged to death elsewhere, yet I will add my comments and hope that they add something new:

1. I’ve taught literally thousands of soldiers about the laws of war, including the fact that there’s no “just following orders” defense. I loved teaching soldiers these rules, and I enjoyed the challenging and insightful questions that so many of the NCOs would ask. How can the Army in which I served 7 1/2 years and thought I knew have sent soldiers to an active war front without training them in the laws of war, if they indeed failed to do this? It’s hard to imagine the soldiers I knew tolerating this, much less participating in it. Worse yet, I have read that the prison had no legal advisor, something exceptionally rare for any unit commanded by a one-star. An enlisted soldier’s most basic personnel record, the Enlisted Records Brief, even contains a check-the-block for “Hague-Geneva” training. It’s an essential must-have in pre-deployment training. Failure to complete it would be hard to excuse. Admittedly, when I see pictures of walloping yokels dancing on burning Hummvees, I thank G-d I’m not nearby with an M-249. Yet the pictures from Abu Ghraib speak of unchecked perversion, not outrage.

2. Aside from that, and presuming the soldiers probably were trained, where are we getting people who are so lacking in common sense, judgment, and conscience that they could do this? Yep, a JAG lawyer can see soldiers take some pretty stupid damming pictures in 5 years prosecuting and defending them, but this could add nothing of real value to the intel picture.

3. I reserve judgment on what the officers and NCOs knew, but I’m tapping my feet while I wait for the answer. I’ve seen too many cases to believe that they ever turn out to be what we originally expect.

4. Presume it’s all true. So? First, I don’t see how dumping Rumsfeld in the middle of a war does anything but score election-year points. You can second guess how many troops Rummy sent, but few who’ve watched him carefully doubt his exceptional intellect, energy, and creativity. You need exactly those qualities to win a war against opponents of exceptional brutality and guile. The idea of pulling out of Iraq and letting the place become Lebanon, Afghanistan, Bosnia, or Cambodia is just as ludicrous now as it was two months ago. Not even Kerry says we should do that.

5. Please give us the news, not the propaganda. The media are beyond reporting the facts. They are emoting, sensationalizing, and campaigning. It seems they will not be pleased with themselves until Sharon Swartworth, Cornell Gilmore, and 700 other selfless Americans have died for nothing. This story has become Michael Jackson and Lacy Peterson, except with Robert Byrd instead of Mark Gerregos.

6. Context, please? Which brings us back to North Korea. First, the mandatory disclaimer that we should never permit our soldiers to violate our laws. That’s obviously what makes us different than those who cut the throat of Daniel Pearl or dragged the bodies through the streets of that stinkhole in Fallujah. It could make us the first nation to effectively police its own war crimes, giving the lie to the embittered Euromyth that Nuremberg was just “victors’ justice.” But why does this story have a moral right to monopolize Page One day after day, when there should be a journalistic duty to use Page One to inform, rather than emote? By what virtue are these acts more horrific than the killing of entire families in gas chambers, or the systematic starvation of two million? Is an Iraqi life of infinitely greater value and newsworthiness (if lives were indeed taken) than the life of a North Korean gulag inmate or an infant crushed under a jackboot? Have the UN, the EU, the BBC, the Red Cross, the New York Times, Le Monde, or any of the usual suspects expressed the same degree of proportional concern about the rights of those victims? Or is this just a replay of The Traffic Accident in 2002, where the size of a story depends not on the number of lives lost or how, but on the degree to which death is an exploitable tool to incite America-hate or win votes?

7. We’re never going to make the readers of Le Monde or the viewers of Al-Jazeera love us, so let’s not grovel excessively trying. In a war, we must uphold that values that we claim brought us to Iraq. We also have to maintain an appearance of resolve when the inevitable screw-ups happen. This is bad, but it’s not My Lai . . . or Halabja. Let our actions speak to those willing to listen that we will hold our own soldiers to the values they swore to uphold. Military justice can be very swift. As for our mobs in Gaza, Cairo, and Peshawar, a clue: if they danced in the streets on 9/11, you can forget about winning their hearts and minds. Go for their throats. We did not start this war. In fact, since at least 1993, we mostly ignored it and tried to wish it away. Since when is any war that isn’t easy unwinnable? Given the value we place on every American life, that makes all war unwinnable by any definition, except in the context of the unknowable number of American civilians this war may save . . . if we win. Will America lose its will over a sacrifice equivalent to what we lost in a week in Vietnam, an hour in World War Two, or an instant in the Civil War? If so, we are doomed . . . and I say this as a father-to-be of two who is subject to call-up from the Reserves.

Finding ourselves at this point in time, we must face the fact that we are doomed if we surrender to those who would exterminate us and hand them a psychological victory from which we could never recover. This means we must ignore ankle-biters like the French–who can’t even win a war against Greenpeace–and other “allies” who only love us when our kids are dying by the hundreds (in fiery plane crashes or on Norman beaches) and won’t even support us in Afghanistan. Allies–that means you, South Korea–who are not with us now when we need them are not allies at all. Kerry can’t explain how he’d do better at getting their support. For the present, we must also ignore (and hope that we can eventually reform) the UN, which fled Iraq at the first bomb, whose cynical mendacity and kleptomania are now laid bare, and whose moral authority has been groundless since at least June 4, 1989.

We will never win the hearts and minds of the heartless and mindless. We can only fight for the survival of our society, for the chance to persuade the next generations that haven’t yet drunk the poison. Doing that will require us to finally realize that we need a real commitment to effective public diplomacy that need not compromise our own national security. In the meantime, this nation must steel itself to fight and win or we will have turned the corner to extinction.

* * *

Lost are more important questions about why we are in Iraq, and why both major candidates at least say publicly that we must finish the job. Consider just a few points that are beyond dispute: (1) regardless of your position before the war–and the facts supporting both sides of the argument have failed to meet expectations–we’re at war now; (2) Saddam had used WMDs and lied repeatedly about having them, and although all intelligence judgments about secretive regimes are full of uncertainty, it would have been the height of negligence to simply take Saddam’s word that he had destroyed them in the face of all the available evidence everyone once seemed to agree on. Saddam had cried “no wolf” too many times to be worthy of belief, and our calculus of risk had changed. If I’m wrong, then why does the 9-11 Commission seem to expect Bush to have invaded Afghanistan the day after his inauguration, after 8 years of easily-excused Clintonian neglect?; (3) Saddam sheltered Abu Abbas, Abu Nidal, and Abdul Rahman Yassin, a key 93 WTC planner and possible Iraqi intel asset. He unquestionably tried to kill President Bush 41 and invaded or attacked four neighboring countries. He may have supported A-Q planners Abu Musab Zarqawi and Mohammad Atta (admittedly, the evidence for both is iffy, but again, the risk was not acceptable and Saddam wasn’t entitled to a high burden of proof), and Al-Qaeda planners Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramsi Yusef, who helped plan WTC 93 and plotted to blow up a dozen US airliners; (4) Saddam’s presence was a permanent threat of war, proliferation, and support for terror that required us to put thousands of our military people in the region and spend billions per year sustaining two no-fly zones and crumbling sanctions, which thieves and hypocrites in France, Russia, China, and the UN itself subverted at the expense of the Iraqi people, yet which they still insist could have tamed Saddam. In fact, the sanctions were collapsing, and an expensive and unsustainable threat of force–300,000 Americans sweating in Kuwait and Qatar and wondering why–was the only way we squeezed any cooperation from Saddam at all. That cooperation would have ended forever the moment the troops came home. After that Mother of All Climbdowns, nothing would have ever restrained Saddam again. Have we forgotten so quickly what Saddam was like when unrestrained?

Of course, the post-war has been a mess. I expected about as much, and wish President Bush had done so publicly. Consider how much time it took to build democracy in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, or Singapore. The key ingredient in all these cases was a relatively benevolent and market-oriented dictatorship that built the two major preconditions for democracy: economic development and a decent educational system. Iraq has neither; it’s not realistic to expect democracy this year or next, particularly there. It’s right to give the Iraqi people a real shot at democracy, but if they themselves won’t put their lives on the line in sufficient numbers to establish it, our minimum requirement may be the same old bad alternative we see in places like Jordan or Kuwait–a less oppressive, non-terror-friendly, relatively stable regime, or three of them controlling a partitioned country.

I emphasize that we should never give up the goal of democracy in Iraq, even if we accept that it would take decades to achieve. But to pull out now, as some are suggesting, would be national suicide. Are we so spineless that we would really contemplate this? Is it so hard to see how our enemies would exploit that? One of those enemies, of course, is North Korea. Given how ugly conflict with North Korea would be, Kim Jong-Il must have already concluded that America would never pay the price needed to deter him. Without a real threat of military deterrence, there is nothing he would be afraid to sell to any terrorist, and there is nothing we can effectively do to remove him without war. The prospects for a disastrous miscalculation suddenly skyrocket.