THE WANDERER, May 13, 2004
JOSEPH SOBRAN'S
WASHINGTON WATCH
The Ideal America
The bad news from Iraq keeps coming relentlessly.
Now we learn that American interrogators have been
torturing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners for the sheer
fun of it, even taking and swapping photos of the sexual
degradation they've inflicted.
President Bush was outraged, and tried to make some
amends by appearing on Arab television to apologize and
to affirm that these horrors "do not reflect" the values
of the American people. But this will be a hard message
to sell the Arabs.
I presume the publicity that these torments have
already received makes it unnecessary to describe them in
detail here. Suffice it that obscenity is quite typical
of American "values" today, and so is the feminism that
placed women at the scene of these spectacles, savoring
the utter humiliation of naked Arab men. These are things
America is notorious for in the Muslim world.
We may prefer to think of them as deviations, but
they are now part of American law, culture, and commerce.
Bush is speaking for an ideal America that has become
little more than an abstraction. If conservatives deplore
them at home, how can we expect Muslims to regard them as
unrepresentative of the real America of today? Why is it
that the flaws we ourselves see in the American character
become mere "propaganda" when Muslims too notice them?
Bush is also trying to abstract his "pre-emptive"
war on Iraq, which he still considers defensive, from
these "excesses," which he sees as extraneous and
contrary to his intentions. He may be quite sincere, but
it hardly matters. To an Iraqi who rejects his
justifications, the whole war is aggressive and the
killing of Iraqi soldiers, not to mention countless
civilians, is no less outrageous than the abuse of
prisoners; it's all of a piece.
From that point of view, it's absurd for Bush to ask
the Arabs to try to understand the whole thing from his
perspective and to appreciate our good intentions. The
most detached Arab philosopher would find this hard to
swallow, and the Arab world isn't in a philosophical mood
right now. It knows that the American troops are going to
stay in Iraq indefinitely, that self-government is a
fiction, and that our protestations of benevolence to the
Arabs are hypocritical.
War always opens a Pandora's box of unforeseeable
and uncontrollable evils. This is why I always regarded
Bush's eagerness for war with foreboding. He approached
the prospect not only with callous indifference to the
inevitable suffering it would cause the Iraqis -- that
was the foreseeable part -- but with utter optimism about
the aftermath.
In the real world you have to take responsibility
for the consequences of your acts. When you set off a
chain reaction of violence, which is what war always is,
it's no use pleading that you didn't intend every
ricochet.
The America Bush led into war wasn't his ideal
America of Christian democracy, but the real America of
overweening government, colossal weapons, staggering
debt, dubious morality, confused purpose, tangled
alliances, and imperfectly disciplined military
personnel. As always the reality was misrepresented by
simple, reassuring symbols, like photos of American
soldiers being welcomed by the natives and tenderly
holding little children in protective poses. Such
misleading images, however, conformed perfectly to Bush's
dream of war.
Now we are seeing other images, some of which have
been smuggled past official censorship. Only a few days
before the torture story broke we saw illicit photos of
the coffins of American soldiers, and Ted Koppel was
fiercely denounced for reading the names of the American
dead on ABC's NIGHTLINE. Now Rush Limbaugh accuses the
news media of overplaying the torture scandal; he
actually says this is a mere liberal ploy to distract us
from the miseries of John Kerry's limping campaign!
Apparently it's the patriotic duty of journalism to
reinforce official optimism about the war, to pretend
that everything is going as planned. Any departure from
the official line gives aid and comfort to the enemy. The
facts must be hidden from the American public, if the
enemy might make use of those facts. Never mind that "the
enemy" -- the entire Muslim world, it seems -- doesn't
depend on the American media for all its information.
Luckily for us, the Arabs are still weak. Imagine
what would happen to us if they had the power to avenge
what America has done to them. In a generation or two we
may learn the hard way.
Meanwhile, even an invincible empire ought to learn
the lesson that its wars shouldn't be based on best-case
scenarios. Brave words like "resolve" and "sacrifice"
didn't tell us what to expect. We had no inkling of the
shame the torture revelations have brought upon us. Bush
didn't warn us that we might wind up more profoundly
hated than we already were. Is that an acceptable price
to pay for whatever we are supposed to be gaining from
the War on Terror?
Chesterton observed, "The real American is all
right. It is the ideal American who is all wrong." That
was a great insight in its day, but times have changed.
Kerry's Compromises
Democrats are worried about the Kerry campaign. Bad
news for Bush -- and there has been no shortage of it --
isn't translating into good news for Kerry. He is simply
an inert candidate, a dull liberal who, like all the
rest, is trying to blur his image. He rails against Bush
while minimizing their real differences.
Given his famous history as a Vietnam protester, you
might expect Kerry at least to oppose the Iraq war.
Nothing of the kind. He merely wants a vaguely
"multilateral" approach, which Bush too is now seeking,
and he is even more committed to supporting a certain
Mideastern "democracy" than Bush is. Antiwar Democrats,
the sort who favored Howard Dean in the primaries, are
frustrated with Kerry's compromises and may defect to
Ralph Nader -- if they bother voting at all.
Issues aside, why do the Democrats keep nominating
such terrible bores? Bill Clinton was an exception, but
look at their other recent nominees: Carter, Mondale,
Dukakis, Gore, and now Kerry. This is a party that ran
out of gas a generation ago, and today it's stuck with
all its old socialist commitments and, worse, socialist
reflexes. Kerry is currently shouting about a thrilling
new federal education policy he envisions, but nobody's
listening.
By the way, I'm informed that Kerry's wife, despite
her private qualms about abortion, lately delivered an
unqualified pro-abortion speech to a feminist group. Just
when I was starting to like her. But the Democrats' party
line on this is absolutely rigid, so the candidate's wife
has to stand by her man.
Kerry himself unblushingly adopts Bill Clinton's
line that abortion should be "safe, legal -- and rare."
And just what steps would this conscientious Catholic
take to ensure its rarity in a country that now sees
about a million abortions a year?
I'll say one thing for Kerry: He is, in his own way,
a frequent communicant. On any given Sunday, he takes
communion in whatever church he happens to find himself
in.
+ + +
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