May 18, 2004
Moral equivocation
I'll get back to Rob's comment later today, I think, but for now I wanted to post a link to Mark Bowden's essay on the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal (with nod to Mr. Sullivan). In short, Mr. Bowden clearly expresses what has always bothered me about the current uproar over these abuses. The opponants of American foreign policy, both domestic and alien, are going ot use this as evidence that the American government is morally equivalent to the Stalinist regime we deposed. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Money quote: "Well, no: whatever the Americans did, it is not the equivalent of cutting out tongues, gouging out eyes, lopping off limbs, stringing people up with piano wire, and executing people by the tens of thousands."
Additional quote: "Any reader of the yearly reports on torture published by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch would pay his weight in antique dinars to stay in an American military prison if the alternative was jail anywhere in the Arab world. Hayder Sabbar Abd, one of the men being abused in the Abu Ghraib photos, said he fully expected to be killed. Of course he did. That's what happens to men thrown in jail in his part of the world."
Those who seek to equate America with totalitarian regimes by equating Abu Ghraib with the systematic and deliberate extermination of millions of people betray a moral sense so twisted and deformed that I serious doubt any dialog is possible. The mere fact that a scandal about these abuses is possible proves beyond doubt that there is a difference. When a select few American soldiers abuse their prisoners, it's a massive deal which threatens to damage our position in the Middle East and world at large for years. But Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-il, Yasser Arafat, Ayatollah Kohmeni, and Muqtada Al-Sadr can consistently use methods that disgrace the very concept of humanity, and we're not allowed to criticize them. There is no excuse for such moral blindness.
Ted Rall's comments on the subject begin something like this: "It's official. The only difference between the American military and the SS is that the SS used gas chambers."
Right.
Posted by: rob at May 18, 2004 10:23 AMI would diagnose Mr. Rall with a congenitally deformed moral organ. This is not someone with whom I can have a conversation.
Posted by: ryan at May 18, 2004 11:23 AMAs you said, there is no excuse. The ironic thing is that, as you mentioned, it is impossible to have a reasoned discussion with someone so lacking in moral sense, but, that person's first accusation will often be that you are unreasonable, hot-headed, or impossible to talk to (as Mr. Rall consistently depicts Mr. Bush in his deplorable comic strip).
Posted by: rob at May 18, 2004 12:22 PMOK, granted. But I'm almost as bothered by the conservative party line, which is that we shouldn't worry about Abu Ghraib because the old regime did much worse, and the Islamofascists want to kill us. Which may be quite true, but so what? When did we agree to play by such dehumanizing rules? No, our soldiers aren't even in the same moral neighborhood as SS officers, but they're still doing bad things -- bad things that may well have been sanctioned by relatively high-placed officials. This is a big deal.
Posted by: mesh at May 18, 2004 03:02 PMMesh: Definently. I wandered around in disgust for several days, depressed as more and more details came out. And reading columns like Thomas Sowell's (column on the matter) is very nearly (if not just) as depressing is enduring Rall's blabber.
Posted by: rob at May 18, 2004 03:16 PMDon't get me wrong: I wouldn't mind a few executions as a result of the Abu Ghraib abuse. Might send the proper message if we take a hard line on this. No society is perfect, and every society has problems. "We're talking about human nature here. It's already deeply fucking perverted." But there is a difference in kind between a society that has failings like the one at Abu Ghraib, punishes those responsible, and fights for liberty, and totalitarian regimes. A really big difference.
I'm not saying we shouldn't worry about Abu Ghraib. That alone changed my mind about what I want in Iraq: I now want us to lose. I think it would be really good for a new, legitimate government of Iraq to kick us out and us to look bad for it. But saying that Abu Ghraib makes us no better than Saddam is, again, morally blind.
Posted by: ryan at May 18, 2004 06:35 PMWhile it may be short-sighted to say that Abu Ghraib makes us no beter than Saddam, it does show that the perpetrators themselves are no better than Saddam. There is a moral equivalence here. The blatant disregard for other human beings is the same in both cases. If what Saddam actually did was more heinous than the soldiers' actions, this is only due to external circumstances. The threat of consequences was more immediatley apparent to the soldiers; and Saddam was more powerful. People do what they can get away with, not particularly all that they'd like to do. As far as relating this to the question of our presence in Iraq, there is no connection. It is not a matter of whether or not our moral superiority has earned us the right to be there, but whether or not the particular circumstances demanded that any nation with the ability to do so intervene.
Posted by: Kevin at May 21, 2004 12:45 AM