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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
The Iraq torture nightmare: Taranto says beheading video shows who's really evil; Sullivan says team Bush humiliated U.S. unforgivably; Brooks calls for a whole new plan; Coulter declares women "too vicious" for military.
May 12, 2004 | Tuesday's horrific video of American civilian Nick Berg being beheaded by Islamic militants in Iraq led some über-hawks, who had been on the defensive after the revelations of U.S. military brutality at Abu Ghraib prison, to counterattack.
"Who'll apologize for this?" Opinion Journal editor James Taranto asked grimly, calling Berg's slaying "a grotesque and timely reminder of who our real enemies are." He added, "Ted Kennedy, take note."
But other conservatives have been so troubled by the torture revelations that they've done some serious soul-searching.
"If I knew before the war what I know now, would I still have supported it?" asked war hawk and blogger Andrew Sullivan on Monday. "I cannot deny that the terrible mismanagement of the post-war -- something that no reasonable person can now ignore -- has, perhaps fatally, wrecked the mission." He answers his own question with a qualified "yes," noting that "much has also gone right in Iraq" and "we must still win." But Sullivan savages the "incompetent" Bush administration for what he views as an inexcusable betrayal of the U.S. cause.
"The one anti-war argument that, in retrospect, I did not take seriously enough was a simple one," writes Sullivan, who a year ago blasted opponents of the war as wobbly and myopic. "It was that this war was noble and defensible but that this administration was simply too incompetent and arrogant to carry it out effectively. I dismissed this as facile Bush-bashing at the time. I was wrong. I sensed the hubris of this administration after the fall of Baghdad, but I didn't sense how they would grotesquely under-man the post-war occupation, bungle the maintenance of security, short-change an absolutely vital mission, dismiss constructive criticism, ignore even their allies (like the Brits), and fail to shift swiftly enough when events span out of control. This was never going to be an easy venture ... and many of us have rallied to the administration's defense in difficult times, aware of the immense difficulties involved.
"But to have allowed the situation to slide into where we now are, to have a military so poorly managed and under-staffed that what we have seen out of Abu Ghraib was either the result of a) chaos, b) policy or c) some awful combination of the two, is inexcusable. It is a betrayal of all those soldiers who have done amazing work, who are genuine heroes, of all those Iraqis who have risked their lives for our and their future, of ordinary Americans who trusted their president and defense secretary to get this right. To have humiliated the United States by presenting false and misleading intelligence and then to have allowed something like Abu Ghraib to happen -- after a year of other, compounded errors -- is unforgivable."
Once a stanch supporter of Bush's war policy, Sullivan now says dealing with that failure of leadership is crucial.
"By refusing to hold anyone accountable, the president has also shown he is not really in control. We are at war; and our war leaders have given the enemy their biggest propaganda coup imaginable, while refusing to acknowledge their own palpable errors and misjudgments. They have, alas, scant credibility left and must be called to account. Shock has now led -- and should lead -- to anger. And those of us who support the war should, in many ways, be angrier than those who opposed it."
New York Times columnist and war hawk David Brooks sounded some similar themes on Tuesday. In a remarkably honest and self-critical column, Brooks wrote, "This has been a crushingly depressing period, especially for people who support the war in Iraq. The predictions people on my side made about the postwar world have not yet come true. The warnings others made about the fractious state of post-Saddam society have ... We went into Iraq with what, in retrospect, seems like a childish fantasy."
Perhaps the most striking passage in Brooks' column is this one, which implicitly repudiates the entire Bush Doctrine: "We didn't understand the tragic irony that our power is also our weakness. As long as we seemed so mighty, others, even those we were aiming to assist, were bound to revolt. They would do so for their own self-respect. In taking out Saddam, we robbed the Iraqis of the honor of liberating themselves. The fact that they had no means to do so is beside the point."
Brooks blasted the Bush administration's foolishness -- and its failure to take responsibility -- in his Times column two days prior:
"Whose bright idea was it to keep Saddam's gulag open as a U.S. prison, anyway?
"It's hard not to be appalled by the Pentagon's blindness to the psychological catastrophe these photos were bound to create. Even [Friday], months after the atrocities were first known, Rumsfeld and company were incapable of answering the most elemental questions from John McCain, Lindsey Graham and others about who was in charge of the prison, and why the photos weren't immediately seen as weapons of mass morale destruction."
He demurred as to whether Rumsfeld should go. But as he called for an overhaul of U.S. foreign policy, Brooks seemed to say that time is fast running out for President Bush and his inept policy team.
"Believe me, we've got even bigger problems than whether Rumsfeld keeps his job. We've got the problem of defining America's role in the world from here on out, because we are certainly not going to put ourselves through another year like this anytime soon. No matter how Iraq turns out, no president in the near future is going to want to send American troops into any global hot spot. This experience has been too searing ...
"We've got to acknowledge first that the old debates are obsolete. I wish the U.S could still go off, after Iraq, at the head of 'coalitions of the willing' to spread democracy around the world. But the brutal fact is that the events of the past year have discredited that approach."
Brooks dismissed the U.N. as a failed institution -- but nonetheless started to sound remarkably like a multilateralist Democrat:
"We've got to come up with a global alliance of democracies to embody democratic ideals, harness U.S. military power and house a permanent nation-building apparatus, filled with people who actually possess expertise on how to do this job."
