From The New York Times, 5/13/04:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/13/opinion/13DOWD.html?hp
Clash of Civilizations
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
The administration's demented quest to conquer Arab hearts and minds
has dissolved in a torrent of pornography denigrating other parts of
the Arab anatomy.
George Bush, who swept into office on a cloud of moral umbrage, now
has his own sex scandal -- one with far greater implications than
titillating cigar jokes.
The Bush hawks, so fixated on making the Middle East look more like
America, have made America look un-American.
Should we really be reduced to defending ourselves by saying at least
we don't behead people?
Gripped in a "I can't look at them -- I've got to look at them" state
of mind, lawmakers grimly filed into private screening rooms on the
Hill to check out the 1,800 grotesque images of sex, humiliation and
torture.
"They're disgusting," Senator Dianne Feinstein told me.
"If somebody wanted to plan a clash of civilizations, this is how
they'd do it. These pictures play into every stereotype of America
that Arabs have: America as debauched, America as hypocrites.
"Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz act like they know all the answers,
almost like a divine right," she said.
"They don't have a divine right, and they are wrong."
After 9/11, America had the support and sympathy of the world.
Now, awash in digital evidence of uncivilized behavior, America has
careered into a war of civilizations.
The pictures were clearly meant to use the codebook of Muslim
anxieties about nudity and sexual and gender humiliation to break down
the prisoners.
Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell said some photographs seemed to show
Iraqi women being commanded to expose their breasts -- such
debasement, after a war that President Bush partly based on women's
rights.
The problem, of course, is that the war in Iraq started with lies --
that Saddam's W.M.D. were endangering our security and that Saddam was
linked to Al Qaeda and 9/11.
In a public relations move that cheapens the heroism of soldiers, the
Pentagon merged the medals for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,
giving the G.W.O.T. medal, for Global War on Terrorism, in both wars
to reinforce the idea that we had to invade Iraq to quell terrorism.
The truth is that our invasion of Iraq spurred terrorism there and
around the world.
That initial deception -- and headlong rush to throw off international
conventions and old alliances, and namby-pamby institutions like the
U.N. and the Red Cross -- led straight to the abuse of Abu Ghraib.
Now the question is whether the C.I.A. tortured Al Qaeda operatives.
Officials blurred the lines to justify ideological decisions, calling
every Iraqi who opposed us a "terrorist"; conducting rough
interrogations, perhaps to find the nonexistent W.M.D. so they would
not look foolish; rolling all opposition into one scary terrorist ball
that did not require sensitivity to the Geneva Conventions or
"humanitarian do-gooders," to use the phrase of Senator James Inhofe,
a Republican.
Senator Fritz Hollings made it clear yesterday that Rummy has left us
undermanned and undertrained in Iraq -- another factor in the torture
scandal.
"Now, in a country of 25 million, you're trying to secure it with
135,000," he scolded Mr. Rumsfeld, adding:
"We're trying to win the hearts and minds as we're killing them and
torturing them."
At least, he said sarcastically, Gen. William Westmoreland never asked
a Vietcong general to take the town, "like we have for Falluja. We've
asked the enemy general to take the town."
The hawks, who promised us garlands in Iraq, should have recalled the
words of the historian Daniel Boorstin, who warned that planning for
the future without a sense of history is like planting cut flowers.
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Amen!
Harry
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