Bush the
Infidel
Once
you’ve killed a certain number of
people, even with the best will in the world, it becomes awkward to make
the cheerful admission, “I goofed.” Halfway
through his river of blood, Macbeth reflects that going
back would be as tedious as going all the way across. Actually, it turns
out that he hasn’t even gone halfway yet.
This is why President Bush will
“stay the course” in Iraq. Forget oil, money, power, and even
reelection: The deepest vested interest is guilt. Bush has done things he
can’t bear to renounce, no matter how costly to America continuing
them may yet become.
Now the pictures from Abu
Ghraib — merry American girls teasing naked Arab men, Arab women
forced to bare their breasts, and the rest of it — threaten to undo all
the good will we’ve so painstakingly built up by bombing Arab
cities and starving Arab children. Life is so unfair.
The photos have added obscene
insults to ghastly injuries, but Bush and Donald Rumsfeld are trying to
insist on a pettifogging distinction: that the injuries inflicted by war
promote democracy and freedom, while the insults shown in the pictures
are contrary to American “values.”
Some churlish Arabs find this
distinction hard to swallow. The values of today’s America are no
longer the wholesome ones expressed by Walt Disney, Norman Rockwell,
and Ozzie and Harriet; we now live in the land of Bill Clinton, Larry Flynt,
and, by a natural extension, Lynndie England.
And the hell of it is, from
Bush’s point of view, that the insults are proving more costly than
the injuries. The desecration of the body, whether a dead American body in
Fallujah or a live Muslim body in Abu Ghraib, is peculiarly inflammatory.
![[Breaker quote: His vested interest in the Iraq war]](2004breakers/040513.gif) So
with poor Nick Berg. His murder might have been taken in
stride, had it been done by, say, a conventional bullet to the head. But the
severing of his head arouses a revulsion so deep we can hardly express it
— as it was meant to. Presumably his killers, among themselves,
talk like our hawks of the air waves: “This is war! The enemy
doesn’t play by the Marquis of Queensbury rules, so why should we?
The only thing those people understand is force.”
Berg’s decapitation did
give Bush a chance to step back into the pulpit of moral indignation the
Abu Ghraib disclosures had made it awkward for him to occupy. Like
Clinton clutching his Bible on the way to a tryst, Bush is most
comfortable in his pose as champion of morality, intoning homilies about
freedom, democracy, and terrorism. He assures us that there was
“no justification whatsoever” for cutting off Berg’s
head — as if the country were divided over the issue.
Only a man out of touch with
reality could suppose that there remains any hope of charming the
Arab-Muslim world with the talisman of American democracy now. It was
a lost cause even before the Abu Ghraib revelations; now it’s less
than a wistful hope — it’s a mad fantasy.
Yet Bush argues that the
unfathomable rage his war has created in the Arab world justifies the war
itself. Every new act of terrorism it provokes proves the need to finish
the war on terrorism. “We will complete our mission,” Bush
says — an ironic comment on his own claim of a year ago:
“Mission accomplished.”
Berg’s murder, he says,
shows the “nature” of the enemy. But the enemy thinks the
war and the degrading tortures — “abuses,” as Rumsfeld
prefers to call them — show the nature of the American mission. It
could hardly be clearer that the Arab-Muslim world sees Bush as anything
but its deliverer. It sees him as the infidel writ large.
But our mission must continue,
Bush insists: “Their intention is to shake our will.” Now is
the time for American “resolve.” This is no time to admit a
colossal mistake, let alone confess guilt. Public support for his war
implicates everyone in the responsibility. That’s why Bush has to
keep insisting that his cause is righteous, even if it never achieves its
purpose. No wonder that, as this sinks in, public support is slipping.
In terms of its original stated
goals, the Iraq war is a failure. Bush’s foreign policy might be
clinically described as autistic — in its self-absorption, its social
blindness, even its linguistic dysfunction. Fate has delivered enormous
power to a very strange man.
Joseph Sobran
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