Sunday was a tough day for me, tough enough that I couldn't sleep and am posting late at night. There are articles by Sy Hersh in The New Yorker, on MSNBC, and in Newsweek that collectively indicate the Abu Ghraib situation is a just a symptom of a much larger disease, that the administration made a conscious decision post 9/11 to discard not just the conventional rules of warfare, but of human decency.
Mind you, from the beginning this has been a "war" entirely from a domestic political point of view. In the aftermath of 9/11 the nation wanted certainty and a hope for the future. For Bush, not exactly a "shades of grey" kind of guy, that meant not only calling the fight agaist terrorism a war, it meant launching an open ended and ill-defined struggle which would only be accomplished when terrorism was eliminated from the globe.
Of course, given that terrorism is neither a nation nor a foe, "war" seems little more than an emotionally appealing term, but using it meant Bush could claim to be a "war president" (essentially all of whom have been re-elected by wide margins in our country's history... an interesting coincidence) and that he could pursue a forceful and and uncompromising agenda, which fits well with his unreflective and immoderate nature.
Instead, terrorism is a technique used by the desperate with few other options. Bush might as well have declared war on fad diets or cosmetic surgery (other techniques of the desperate). So we have a faux war. One that gives the administration political talking points without any actual way of measuring progress, knowing what "winning" means, or requiring any sacrifice from the American people.
The last point is crucial. Had Bush been willing in the days after 9/11 to ask for real commitment on our part to change the world and make it safer for our children, he would have gotten it. Had he said, "We need to roll back the tax cuts on the top 2% to fund the war on terror" the very people paying that money, his core base, would have applauded his decision. Had he called for significantly increasing our armed forces, partially for combat, but more for the nitty-gritty of saving failed states that breed terrorists, he would have gotten the people he needed. Had he asked our allies, whom we saved from despotism 60 years ago and protected from the same for the next 40 years, to share in this burden, he would have been hailed as a wise and visionary leader of the free world. (And, in my opinion, he would still be at 80% in the polls and heading for a landslide re-election).
Instead our faux war has been waged on the cheap. No rise in taxes. No increase in the armed services. No cost/benefit analysis on whether occupying a distant and complex Arab Islamic country would be worth the effort. Indeed, no real understanding of what it would mean to invade such a nation.
There are ways, even with our current force levels, to put more boots on the ground in Iraq and possibly --- but not certainly ---- to stabilize the country. But all of them would require hard decisions or compromises, any of which are beyond the capability of this incompetent administration. It's EASY to hope for the best. It's EASY to ignore advice from professionals who know their fields. And apparently it's easy to give up basic moral decency, such as observing the Geneva Conventions, instead of making the hard decisions it takes to prosecute a nebulous conflict.
I'm no longer a young man and have lived through a lot of disappointments: the Vietnam war, the draft, and the protests; the Watergate hearings and the loss of faith in our national institutions; Jimmy Carter's feckless leadership and the "national malaise"; Iran contra and astrologers in the White House; and fat interns with visible thongs almost bringing a government down.
Clearly I don't like the Bush administration, but even in the worst moments I never dreamed this government, our government, would consciously choose to ignore the Geneva Conventions, the most basic codifications of human decency. If the reports in Newsweek and the New Yorker are true, we have seen the high point of America and the descent will be swift.
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