Angry At Politics

I was going to write about Disney, Miramax, Jeb Bush, and Michael Moore, but events have run ahead of me. Suffice it to say that if Michael Moore was only a bit more clever, he would have generated a firestorm of publicity closer to the release date of his film. But enough about that. I want to talk about the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison, and about Bob Rumsfeld's testimony in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Some people I've spoken to have expressed outrage over the acts committed at Abu Ghraib, but have tempered their outrage with an understanding that terrible things inevitably occur during a war. While the temptation exists to respond rhetorically and question how they'd respond if the tables were turned, but ultimately, such speculation is neither helpful nor relevant. The greater issue presented by this kind of thinking is the question of why we go to war.

War is the most awful of humanity's practices, but history teaches us that it is sometimes inevitable. When war is justified, violation of human rights is the necessary result. While it is right and proper to attempt to minimize these violations, and to hold accountable its perpetrators, it is irresponsible and wishful thinking to believe that we will not commit them. America is no more immune than any other country to the horrors of war. That said, sometimes the necessity of war overshadows these concerns, and we willingly make the hard choice to go to war despite our certainty that some abuses will occur.

It is now clear that this war, though perhaps somewhat beneficial in certain ways to national and world security, was also unnecessary. It is also clear that whatever benefits this war has brought, it has come at great cost: an increase in hatred of the US, a further destabilization of the Middle East, a loss of goodwill among our allies, etc. Now we face disgrace in the eyes of the world. And we face this disgrace because of the way we entered into war.

Though WMDs were ostensibly an important justification for going to war, few of us in America believe any longer that WMDs exist in Iraq, and few of us believe that our administration went to war primarily because of an honest belief that WMDs existed. We now understand that the threat of WMDs was just the front end of a bait-and-switch operation. In fact, there were other goals, which the Bush administration has purposefully not made clear, that they were seeking to achieve. The way the war was sold to us was that we had good reason to believe that there were WMDs, and that Saddam couldn't be trusted, and that he was a brutal dictator, and that we could build a democracy in Iraq. Though none of these alone might have been sufficient for war, together they were a compelling case for many. Indeed, the idea that this would be a quick campaign that would be narrowly targeted at Saddam and his security apparatus and military, and which would be followed by a rebuilding process that would lift Iraq and bring it to the table of civilized, modern, free nations. This war was pitched to us as against Saddam Hussein, not against the people of Iraq.

What did we actually get? Well, there were no WMDs, there was no quick military campaign, and while we got Saddam, we did not rid the Iraqi people of his brand of brutality. And we certainly didn't get a new democracy in Iraq, though hope remains that this goal might still be achieved. So why are we in Iraq? What are our goals? It doesn't appear that there's any reason behind this war that could possibly temper my outrage that American troops are engaged in torture. Today, George Bush's America has been exposed. Around the world, people see America as hypocritical, arrogant, brutal, and morally astray. On the playground, those are the characteristics of a bully, and the only way to defeat a bully on the playground is to face him, fight him, and beat him. But in the America we love, there's another way to defeat a bully, and that's to vote him out of office.