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Torturous apology
Mark Steyn
’Just look at the way US army reservist Lynndie England holds the leash of the naked, bearded Iraqi," writes Robert Fisk, famed Middle East correspondent of the London Independent.

"Take a close look at the leather strap, the pain on the prisoner’s face. No sadistic movie could outdo the damage of this image. In September 2001, the planes smashed into the buildings; today, Lynndie smashes to pieces our entire morality with just one tug on the leash."

Hmm. Sounds like Fiskie’s the one straining at the leash here. You can practically hear him panting. Down, boy.

For a week now, readers have been e-mailing me crowing that I haven’t got the guts to confront the truth about Abu Ghraib prison. As one correspondent put it, "I was looking forward to reading about how the moronic lefty press should instead be praising those heroic American soldiers bringing freedom, and saving us from those barbaric Arabs. I thought at least that you’d say that you’d have done the same thing in their position."

Well, no, actually. Making a homoerotic pyramid of fetching young Iraqi men naked with their bottoms in the air is not my idea of a good time, unless it’s 48 hours from the Turner Prize deadline at London’s Tate Gallery and I’m all out of ideas for this year’s installation.

So I didn’t write about it last week, because I didn’t have anything much to say. I’m revolted by the abuse of prisoners, but evidently not as revolted as Fiskie and Co., so best to let ’em off the leash and go capering round the yard.

And now that they have, let me say this: As a political scandal, it’s already over. Historians will disagree about the precise moment it turned into a damp squib. Perhaps it was when Democratic blowhard Joe Biden demanded of Don Rumsfeld: "What did he know and when did he know it?" Or perhaps it was when the Democrats’ leader in the Senate, Tom Daschle, launched into a long, whiney complaint about why he and his colleagues hadn’t been kept informed by the Pentagon. "Why were we not told in a classified briefing why this happened, and that it happened at all?" he huffed. "That is inexcusable; it’s an outrage."

Got that? To Senator Daschle, the outrage isn’t the Iraqi buttock mountain or the dog shots, but the fact that the Pentagon had had the appalling lese-majeste not to inform the Senate grandees about it before it turned up on TV. The Democrats have become so formulaic in their Bush-bashing they can’t recognize a real scandal when it drops in their lap.

When you’ve got a bunch of shocking pictures, and darker rumours about rape, murder and corpse mutilation, how dumb do you have to be to start talking about breaches of Senate process (Daschle) and reciting tired old cliches from Watergate (Biden)?

Congratulations to the Senate Dems for making a very particular and graphic scandal sound like all the other dead horses they’ve been flogging for the last year. On Friday, when they pulled the defense secretary in for the full Senate grilling and demanded to know why he hadn’t resigned, Rumsfeld seemed positively affable about entertaining the proposition.

AS WELL he might. According to that day’s polls, 69% of Americans want him to stay on as defense secretary. In other words, half the folks planning to vote for John Kerry don’t want Rummy to quit.

They understand, even if Ted Kennedy and The New York Times don’t, that the ritual sacrifice of one of Bush’s key lieutenants is a concession to America’s enemies for no good reason.

It’s all very well for Robert Fisk to assert breezily that one West Virginia woman walking a naked Muslim man round like a dog "smashes to pieces our entire morality." He’s an anti-American reporter for a left-wing British newspaper. But Democratic Senators tread that path at their peril. The recent spate of embittered memoirs by disaffected treasury secretaries, terrorism bureaucrats and foreign service diplomats is one thing: they’re anti-Bush, anti-Rummy, anti-Condi.

But, when you start bandying around speculation on widespread systemic torture authorized all the way up the chain, that’s not anti-Bush but anti-military. Senate Democrats may be high on Vietnam analogies, but when they start impugning the integrity of the US armed forces, the American people are never going to follow them.

Besides, in the broader sense, what’s going on in those pictures is as problematic for Dems as it is for Bush. Fisk thinks it’s your basic clash of cultures: "Could neo-conservative Christianity – Lynndie is also a churchgoer – have collided so violently, so revoltingly, so obscenely with Islam?"

"Neo-conservative Christianity"? What the heck is that? I thought all we sinister neocons were Jews.

The reality is that Lynndie’s appetites owe less to her churchgoing than to her embarking in Iraq on an affair with her comrade (and accomplice) Spc Charles Graner. (Private England is four months pregnant with Graner’s child.) Graner was formerly a Pennsylvania prison guard and has a history of domestic violence. Rather than concocting fictional demographics – West Virginia trailer-park neoconservative Christians – Bush-bashers might at least try to retain some tenuous grip on planet earth.

In contrast to hyperventilating Kennedys, the American people seem to be able to distinguish between the actual, specific abuse, which is wrong and should be punished, and the attempt to burden it with some highly selective generalized significance, which is rightly seen as a lot of baloney.

In that sense, I deeply regret President Bush’s apology. I’m often dismissed as a Bush apologist, but I decline to be a Bush apologist for the Bush apology.

If he wanted to apologize, he should have apologized to Ahmed bin Jihad, or whoever the fellow in the dog collar is, and left it at that. But to be coerced into apologizing more generally is very foolish. What happened at Abu Ghraid is terrible because it’s an offense to American values, not Arab ones.

It’s ridiculous to insist that America has to apologize to Arab thugocracies in which what’s merely simulated in those photographs is done for real every day of the week.

As for the allegedly seething Arab street, my advice to it would be to lay off the interviews, or at least not to respond to the pictures by saying things like, "They wanted us to feel as though we were women, the way women feel, and this is the worst insult, to feel like a woman."

When you imply that being an Arab woman is analogous to perpetual degradation, you remind Americans that being "insensitive" to certain cultures is not necessarily a bad thing.


Posted by: tipper 2004-05-12
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=32770