Posted on 05/11/2004 6:18:34 AM PDT by OESY
Quite possibly, George W. Bush has awakened to the most important danger arising from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, its use by his Beltway enemies to destroy his administration. The current target of opportunity is Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, but the strategic goal is to topple the president himself.
The baying of the hounds reached its peak over the weekend when even Britain's Economist magazine bannered "Resign, Rumsfeld" on its cover. Its usually sensible editors, who have supported the war on terror, clearly had come under the influence of the hysteria whipped up over the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners.
Over the weekend, the Bush forces finally launched a counterattack, although by the nature of things in American politics, it will receive less press notice than the attacks themselves. The formidable Bush national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said Mr. Rumsfeld is doing a good job "in one of the most challenging periods of American history." Vice President Dick Cheney, a former defense secretary himself, went even further, calling Mr. Rumsfeld "the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had."
The strongest people in the Bush administration, including Mr. Rumsfeld, know what is at stake here. It is not just whether Mr. Bush will be re-elected, but whether the war on terror itself will fizzle out like the Vietnam war did 30 years ago. Indeed, some of the same characters are involved. John Kerry, who gave Hanoi aid and comfort after his return from the war, is now running for president. Seymour M. Hersh, the reporter who has just revived his career with his Abu Ghraib story in The New Yorker, 35 years ago broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. His work then helped turn Americans against that war.
Even before the Abu Ghraib story broke on CBS, leaders around the world were beginning to have doubts about Mr. Bush's assurances that he would "stay the course" in Iraq. They were heightened by the public reaction to Abu Ghraib but also by what appeared to be an uncertain trumpet in the siege of Fallujah, when the U.S. Marines first poised themselves to clean out Saddam's holdouts and then turned the job over to Iraqis.
An Asian politician I spoke with recently told me that if the U.S. fails in Iraq, "we're all in trouble." No wonder he is concerned. Terrorist groups, spun off from Osama bin Laden's training camps and Wahabi hate schools, have been sprouting like dragon's teeth in Asia, carrying out such atrocities as the night club bombing on Bali.
Opinion polls suggest that Americans approve of the way Mr. Bush has handled the Abu Ghraib affair. His expressions of outrage and his explanation to Arabs that the behavior of the guards at the prison camp was not consistent with American values, seemingly went down very well. But whoever leaked the oval office dressing-down he gave Mr. Rumsfeld took the mea culpas to another level, sharpening the blood lust of the Pentagon's enemies, which include some of the denizens of the administration's foreign policy branch.
To get back to giant press "scoops," it should be noted that Mr. Hersh's twin killings both resulted from investigations by the Army itself. Lt. William Calley Jr. who led the platoon at My Lai, was being court-marshaled when Mr. Hersh interviewed him. The story about the Abu Ghraib troop misbehavior was based on a report by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba highly critical of the management of the prison and methods used by interrogators. If the army made a mistake it was not because the commanders, or Mr. Rumsfeld, were not doing their jobs, but because they allowed the report to leak rather than making it public as soon as it was completed.
Of course, that doesn't always head off trouble, either. The Reagan administration itself disclosed the details of the muddled extralegal scheme of Oliver North and others to raise money for the anticommunist "contras" in Nicaragua. But the Democrats whooped it up as a political issue anyway.
The issue that concerned the army itself at Abu Ghraib was the use of prison guards to "prepare" captives for indoctrination. There is of course the danger that "breaking down" captives will escalate from such mild techniques as sleep deprivation to outright physical torture, which seems to have happened in a few instances. Aside from ethics, the use of guards for these purposes is not condoned by army doctrine because it makes a prison population harder to control.
Interrogators, however, have an important role in warfare, particularly the kind of war now being fought in Iraq, against guerrillas who hide among the civilian population. You have to learn the identities of combatants if you're going to search them out and kill or capture them. The battlefield intelligence officers and the civilian translators who work for them have that job. It's not surprising that some, feeling pressure for results, fudged army regulations, however inexcusable that might have been.
The Vietnam war posed a similar problem when the U.S. military found that the most innocent looking civilians, including women and teenagers, might be prepared to kill. Indeed, terrorism in general is that kind of warfare, in which a pretty young woman climbing on a bus in Israel, for example, might have been conditioned and equipped by her psychological masters to blow everyone and herself up.
There is, of course, some irony to be found in the fact that the American press and public by and large accepted the slaughter of Iraqi troops with cluster bombs and other ordnance during the actual invasion of Iraq. That was the conventional warfare many accept when dictated by political necessity. The war on terrorism poses more complex moral issues.
The Bush administration will have to navigate this minefield as best it can. But it mainly will need to avoid being routed by domestic enemies and opponents of its efforts in Iraq. One mistake to avoid is to try to appease them by throwing Rummy to the wolves.
That is one of the funniest things I've ever heard
Good one, indeed!Why Broadcast Journalism is
Unnecessary and Illegitimate
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.