The Billiken's Bluff

So I had a little time on my hands this morning and I was really hoping to get up a post about last night's Sweden-England game so I could give love to the Swedes and hate a little bit on Beckham, the Derek Jeter of the international sports world. Then I comes in and sees the Got's post below, which he indicates will be is final words on the whole Iraq controversy, much debated here at Billiken over the past couple of years. So I says to myself, I says, I should really get up a response and make it my final say on the whole issue too.

Predictably, I am utterly appalled by the Got’s last post. Now, it goes without saying that the Abu-Ghraib disaster was a despicably depraved series of events, and it requires no stretch of comprehension to understand why seeing those images in the news would leave even the most rational of moral people in a sputtering rage, much less concerned Americans who had been against the war in the first place. However, there are limits to how much lunacy these frustrations excuse, and can be endured.

First, please consider the implications of stating that the depraved images that came out of Abu Ghraib were “more vivid and telling of where we were as a country” than the evidence left behind at scenes like Auschwitz (referenced below). Comparing the emotional reaction one has to images of Abu Ghraib humiliation and the reality of the holocaust’s mass murder, I suppose, is subjective – although personally I have never in person seen anything as overwhelming and soul-killing as all those glass cases of hair and children’s clothes etc. that remain at Auschwitz, and I find the suggestion that the AG prisoner snapshots – depraved though they were - were more “vivid” to be a bit of an affront.

But to say they were more “telling of where we are as a country” – this is worse. What a vile suggestion, this. Those AG pictures splattered in the world press were images of criminal acts, furiously reviled and condemned by US citizens. The people in those pictures have been prosecuted and put in jail. Right now, as O.J. Simpson struggles to decide between a pitching wedge or a sand wedge, that Graner guy is serving a ten-year jail sentence. I personally would argue that he and his ilk should have gotten more, but still (that shit’s nervous son).



The statement that these pictures are “telling of where we are a country” rather than an aberration reviled and punished by our society implies further that this sort of behavior represents, in some meaningful way, that of the US military. Can evidence be presented here that the vast majority of men and women in uniform risking their lives overseas do not in fact follow orders and go about their jobs not only under the strictures of military code and professionalism but with the guidance of their own morals and sense of decency? That they are not, in fact, as humanitarian as their profession allows? If not, I think it quite the slander to say that the sickening transgressions of the unlawful few are “telling” of the country, its military, and its place in the world as an “international entity.”

We have never seen nor would we expect to see on Billiken images such as this,



or this,



or pictures of soldiers passing out ballots



or getting a town's water system working again;



nor would we expect if such images ever reached the light of day that the same strained efforts would be applied to find that they are important and vivid symbols. That they are “telling.” We all know kids from our high schools or towns etc. that have gone or remain in Iraq or Afghanistan, and I can promise you through the knowledge of even that small statistic sample known personally – if not from a larger faith in the humankind in general - that there are at least as many of the type of people shown above as there are Lyddie Englands and the rest of the dirty dog-leash dozen.

The more deserved complaint about those AG events, of course, is that the event signaled a failure for the US military and the Defense Department as organizations. I am quite sure that there are valid arguments to be made that Donald Rumsfeld should have resigned or have been asked to resign following the failures of oversight and discipline that allowed things at AG to have gotten so out of hand. I don’t know enough about the chain of command involved and the particulars of the incident to be able to comment usefully on whether higher-ups were ultimately let off the hook when they should have been held accountable.

But it is clear even absent such an analysis how misdirected the Got’s rage has become when he says, presumably of Bush and his administration, that “he/they should have resigned in 2004.” What on earth does that mean? The whole administration should have resigned because of these failures of oversight … and handed the government to whom? In 2004 the Bush administration’s opponents made their case to the American people that the administration was mismanaging international affairs and that they could do a better job. And the American electorate told them to go jump in a lake. It remains ridiculous to suggest today that the administration should have walked away from responsibilities the electorate democratically entrusted them with – twice – to hand over the government to an opposition power for whom they did not vote and with whom they did not trust the management of a country and its affairs.

Abu Ghraib was a horrible setback for the US and its goals. But inasmuch as the conflict in Iraq involves its own war for the “hearts and minds” of the people, the event was a lost battle that did not and could not necessitate our surrender in that war. The Got writes of AG that the US as an “international entity” should “shamefully bow out” after such an incident. A travesty of thought. If the US were to “bow out” of Iraq, consider what fate this withdrawal would leave to the Iraqis? The terrorist thugs who kidnap and torture the innocents in the name fundamentalist extremism may not take digital photography that the Got may find as symbolic and “vivid” as the AG shots, but their techniques are immeasurably more brutal and the effects of their maiming that much more permanent.

The United States, for better or worse, has invested years and lives into its mission in Iraq, and whatever sins arising from AG the country “as an international entity” can collectively be held for have been paid for a million times over with our own blood.



Our continuing obligation not to “bow out” after AG is no less true for all the gruesome setbacks our forces and the Iraqi people face from the terrorists there today. I find it unthinkable that we would abandon the Iraqis now, after all this, when their security forces remain precariously developed; whatever shame has been met in the past and whatever further setbacks wait in the future, the US has to stay and finish the job (until the Iraqis can continue it in their own).



It will do no good now to look back and try to rewrite history in a way so as to allow events to jibe with the anger and frustration (often deserved) that people feel from this exhausting and difficult conflict. Yes, the president knew who Zarqawi was before March 2003 (come on dude); look at the speech he gave in October 2002 about Iraq providing him with aid, or the presentation Colin Powell gave on him in the winter of 2003 to the UN. No, we did not go into Iraq to steal oil, or so Cheney could benefit from his (nonexistent) holdings in Halliburton and walk out of the jungle rich. The image may be from Death of a Salesman, but the sentiment is straight out of Michael Moore-land.

But we’ve been over all this before; believe in what fairy tales you must. The perceptions held and rationales for taking war to Iraq were what they were at the time, and are stated plainly in records to be examined and debated as seen fit by history. But the trees are no less trees and no less a forest make for the Got’s inability to see them. And it’s going to take more than vivid imagery and imagined symbols to cut them down.