Site Presented By
Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Steyn slams Bush for torture apology, Hagelin blames abuses on American porn culture; Savage calls for U.S. to kill "thousands" of Iraqi prisoners and drop an H-bomb on an Arab capital. Plus: Heartland hard-liners dub same-sex marriage licenses "death certificates."
May 19, 2004 | As the Bush administration confronts widening exposure of what increasingly appears to be its systematic policy, at least at some level, of interrogating war prisoners using inhumane treatment, the chorus of conservatives blasting Bush's post-invasion leadership as "incompetent" and based on "childish fantasy" has grown louder and louder. Though the bloody Iraqi insurgencies of April have quieted to some degree, the Bush team is now caught in perhaps the fiercest political firefight of its tenure since launching the invasion 14 months ago. Numerous critics on the right are angry over what they see as a series of strategic blunders, while others have demanded that the president take direct responsibility for the politically devastating torture scandal.
But not syndicated columnist Mark Steyn. The über-hawk has held his ground -- and actually is ripping Bush from the other direction. Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times this week, Steyn scoffed at Bush for not taking a harder line through the turbulent revelations of abuses by the U.S. military. He says that the only apology Bush should be making now is to Americans -- for going "soft" and apologizing to our enemies in a "fake" war over world opinion.
"The war on terror will be lost in the talking shops of Washington -- i.e., it will be thanks to the lack of resolve inculcated by excessive exposure to blow-dried pundits and Senate hearings. The war now has two fronts. In Iraq, the glass is half-full. In Washington, it's half-empty, and draining fast.
"The administration, in trying to see its way through both the phony crossfire and the real one, has been rattled by the fake war. Someone in the White House needs seriously to stiffen the Bush rhetoric ... Bush has to go back to speaking Rumsfeldian, not Powellite: He has to talk about winning total victory, hunting down the enemy and killing them."
Steyn says Bush shouldn't forget that the U.S. prisoner abuses are a matter of relative evil.
"He also needs to promise himself that he'll never again apologize to some Arab despot -- even relatively benign ones, like the king of Jordan -- for events in Iraq. If he feels the need to apologize, he should apologize to the American people for apologizing to the Arab world. This isn't just because what went on in Abu Ghraib is a picnic -- well, a Paris Hilton video picnic -- compared to what goes on every day in the prisons of our Arab 'allies.'"
While he's not the first right-winger to downplay the abuses by making a bizarre pop-culture comparison (Rush Limbaugh chose Madonna and Britney Spears), Steyn adds an interesting strategic rationale to his argument:
"More important than that, the Bush apology buys into one of the most fetid props of the region's so-called stability -- 'pan-Arabism.' If U.S. troops 'humiliated' some Portuguese prisoners, the president wouldn't apologize to the king of Norway or the prime minister of Slovenia. So why, when U.S. troops humiliate Iraqi prisoners, would he apologize to Jordan's King Abdullah or Egypt's thug-for-life? 'Pan-Arabism' is one reason why the region's a sewer. If Iraq succeeds, it will be by breaking with regional solidarity."
But some conservative military bloggers are now rejecting Steyn's brand of hard-liner bravado, pointing to powerful benefits from Bush's apology, particularly in the Arab media. Joe Carter, a career U.S. Marine from Texas who authors the Evangelical Outpost blog, reports a change of heart on the issue.
"When President Bush apologized for the events at Abu Ghraib prison I thought it was a mistake. At the time I believed that the apology would send the wrong message to the Arab street and be perceived as a sign of weakness. I felt it would imply that both the military and the Administration were not only responsible for the atrocities but culpable for the actions of a few criminals. I was wrong."
Carter cites a recent e-mail from an unnamed Marine colonel in Iraq who says he was struck by the degree to which Bush's apology has had a positive effect. The e-mail was posted by fellow military blogger Blackfive, a former U.S. Army major and Defense Intelligence Agency officer (who provides only his real first name, Matthew.) In the e-mail, the Marine colonel recounts a recent broadcast he saw on Arab television:
"'Why does Arab media fail at self criticism and why can't Arab human rights NGOs pressure Arab governments the way their counterparts do in America?', asked the host of satellite news channel al-Arabiy[a]'s (one of the harshest critics of the United States) 'Spotlight' news program. The follow up commentary was even more astounding, given the source. 'The Americans exposed their own scandal, queried the officials and got the American Government to accept responsibility for the actions of its soldiers,' stated the host before asking her guests why this sort of open and responsive action isn't taken in the Arab world."
