Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

Some Arabs become ALL Arabs and ALL Arabs are the enemy now. This week Rumsfield showed a picture of some armed fighters in Fallujah in a mosque and said "That's what they do in their mosques." They. Those people.

Last week the right-wing press was trumpeting that Hillary Clinton said bad things about Bush "to the Arab press." It was to an Arabic-language newspaper IN LONDON! And one of the "enemy" capitals that reprinted the treasonous interview was Islamabad!

The Republicans are no longer hiding that to them this really IS a "Crusade" against Islam.

Ah... Glennuendo. "You nag at me for murdering ONE troublesome neighbor, but where's your outrage at Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed fifteen people? Your lack of balance betrays your true, pro-Dahmer sentiments!" It's a really stupid argument, and the most common application of it is the "where are feminists in condemning the Sudanese? Why are they bothering to fight for choice here, since American women already have it reasonably good?!" I'm surprised to see Drezner sink to it, though.

One cannot compare the actions of people whose country has been invaded by a foreign power to the actions of a powerful invader. This does not excuse the inhumanity of terror, but it helps to see it in proper perspective. If the Fallujah fighters had jet planes, attack helicopters and tanks, it is not unreasonable to think that they might use these means instead of terror to force the invaders to leave their country.

Dan said: ..."Does anyone think that any of the Arabs interviewed for this story displayed even the slightest hint of rage or shame at the Arabs who burned four American civilian contractors in Fallujah?"...

Yeah, without specific information to the contrary, I generally ascribe normal, basic human reactions to Arabs (and others). I wonder why this Drezner tool doesn't? Does he have information that not "ANY" of the Arabs showed the "SLIGHTEST HINT"?...If not, why does he assume otherwise?

The Arabs quoted in his post have normal, sophisticated questions, "Shame on America. How can they convince us now that it is the bastion of democracy, freedoms and human rights? Why do we blame our dictators then?" I don't see these quotes as coming from the types that "danced in the streets" at US deaths. Maybe I started with the wrong assumptions.

There are reasonable moderates on both sides of this thing. Then there are the kill'em all assholes, in the US and the ME. There's also "sophisticated" blowhards, who despite some kind of huge blind spot regarding people of a specific race, still pretend to be some kind of objective analyst. Social-scientist scholars, no less.

To the extent that anyone can look the other way when a transgression against humanity takes place just because it is someone they have no personal sympathy for then they have indeed abandoned the moral high ground.

Hope this isn't OT, but I would just like to add that I am a little amazed at the reaction (in the US) to these pictures. I totally understand how it might be (don't know) devastating to our "hearts and minds" effort over there, but overall, I have to wonder why everyone is so surprised?

Not to excuse anything, but this is a war. Horrible things happen, everyday. Much worse things than this, surely. True surprise at the actions of young sadistic grunts strikes me as terribly naive. I guess no one has any idea what happens in US prisons, to US citizens? Isn't being made someone's "bitch" or "picking up the soap in the showers" pretty much a universal joke for most people?

The fact that these Iraqi POW's are even alive is most likely due to a split second decision, made by a nervous, scared grunt not to blast them into pink mist. If a US soldier is afraid for their safety (and I don't blame them) they can make the decision, at any moment, to pull the trigger. No questions asked. This type of decision is made everyday over there, and was probably made when these POW's were captured, so they're probably only alive as a result of a bit of luck.

IOW, they could have been dead, and nobody would raise a peep. That's war. Thousands of innocent people have been killed, for an uncertain future. That's the real tragedy. And why I opposed the war, at every step.

I am continually amazed at what gets people upset. During the first Gulf War, it was the environmental degredation and dead sea birds from the oil fires that got a reaction. Not so much for the tens of thousands of dead people.

I can only conclude people have no idea what happens in a war.

ligimos is right we ("people" -He means us) are sheltered from the reality of war.
Even his account of the "POWs" seems slanted. They are Arab males who might be soldiers or, merely civilians. It is Bush, remember, who claims that most are freedom-seeking civilians who need to be liberated from a few thugs.

Is this "sheltering" a good thing? There is the middle ground,no?
Spare us the details but give us a truthful account of the battlefield --is that asking too much? Apparently. So we have some of the horrific details.
If one is not OUTRAGED by these (recent and more recent) photos then the problem is much worse.

I believe at the core of all the attempts at rationalizations and comparisons is the fact that most US-Americans, including your right-wingers, are shocked at this, because "we don't do this" (hopefully), or at least "not that bad", or perhaps just "we don't get caught with shit like this".

Everybody would want to think of their own society/environment as morally high-standing, and this introduces a significant cognitive dissonance. A reaction to this that is if not natural, then at least common, for those who refuse to correct their righteous views of the world and themselves, is to explain away the dissonance by approaches like these:

* questioning the authenticity of the evidence
* shifting the blame from the perpetrators to external factors
* pointing out others have done worse and thus it's not that bad really (optionally using "body-count" metrics)
* pointing out that the victims are criminals and it is in some way deserved
* turning against the reporters/accusers (how can you expose us like that/besmirch our image)
etc.

It is the third-person (or plural first-person?) equivalent of Johnny who gets caught in school doing naughty things pointing his finger at Jimmy and explaining how he has done the same or even worse, or how Jimmy told or encouraged him to do it. The interesting part is to see this from people who you should think are beyond this and have a moral and value system of their own.

The happenings in German concentration camps during WW2 and the persecutions of minorities received similar reactions from Germans, only that at the time they were not publicly reported or discussed, at least in Germany. This made it far easier to dismiss them as enemy propaganda.

I didn't think Drezner had this in him. My mistake.

For the record, I remember reading many accounts of the reaction in Baghdad to the Falluja desecrations. There was genuine horror - which was quickly followed by anger at the American assault on Falluja.

People tend to care most about their own. Surely Drezner has noticed that the Abu Ghraib story has not had the same level of coverage in the US that the lynchings of the four US contractors in Falluja had? So spare me the righteousness indignation of American public opinion.

A reminder to Dr. Drezner and others - this is all happening in Iraq. It's not happening in the United States of America. So spare me the cheap moral parallelisms, while you're at it.

(sigh) A few blessed days of universal condemnation of what happened at Abu Ghraib, then the lame rationalizations begin. I wish I could say I expected better...

Dan Drezner has posted an update, which I quote in plaintext:

ANOTHER UPDATE: Matthew Yglesias, Brad DeLong, and especially PaulB in the comments raise some trenchant and valid objections to the tone/content of my post (though Brad is stretching my position by more than a little bit).

This may have been one of those times in which I let my "mild nationalism" (as Matt put it) get the better of me and, as a result, compose a post with too much truculence and too little penitence in it.

So, let's close this with a clear statement -- the actions at Abu Ghraib were inexcusable and despicable acts that are repugnant in and of themselves. They needlessly inflame an already inflamed Arab street, and knock us down a peg in the eyes of other countries and their citizens.

btw - did anyone else pick up on the how interrogations at Abu Ghraib were being performed by military intelligence, CIA and CIVILIAN CONTRACTORS?! Is there a division of Haliburton that does this sort of thing? What the %&$* is going on?

The seminal text of modern Islamist thought, Qutb's Signposts, was written in Nasser's concentration camps, and many believe his and his comrade's experience of torture there helped push him toward the radical position of declaring secular Muslim states like Nasser's to be 'pagan' and so subject to jihad. Ayman Al=Zawahiri has written about the radicalizing impact of torture in Mubarak's jail, outrage that led him to first target Mubarak's regime for overthrow and, when that failed, to turn on the "distant enemy". So, yes, there are Arabs that have responded with outrage to the practice of torture by Arab states, and there will surely be many more who will draw the same conclusions from our torturing.

Second, it is the policy of the United States to divide the world into two groups: the enormous majority of right-thinking peace-loving people everywhere, and the insane fundamentalist terrorists of Al Qaeda and its ilk.

Did the Bush administration change its line while I wasn't looking? Last I checked, Bush's policy was almost as exclusive as OBL's .

Consider these :
'Either with us or against us';
'We don't need our allies, or the UN, or the world';
'Islam vs. Western civilisation - although we are generous and would share the benefits of the latter with the rest of world, oh, what was that you said, yeah, we need to bomb these benefits in - hmm, of course we believe that everyone is suitable for democracy, even if their skin colour isn't the same as ours( given the racial make-up of the Merkin population, I have these visions of the US fighting a pre-emptive war against 'dem Martians with their green skins who are crying out for democracy'), but we know that invading them and bombing them is the best way to bring them democracy'.

The policy you outline above is one which the US *should* have been following. Unfortunately, it isn't.

The abuse of Iraqi prisoners or any prisoners is the expected outcome of any prison system where there is a lack of oversight and transparency. As Americans, we should DEMAND that American run prisons in Iraq and elsewhere be completely open to inspection by the Red Cross and that Red Cross have access to prisoners and can listen to their complaints. Having outside observers not only protects the prisoners, but also their guards. If the system is open and transparent, then the assurances by the guards that prisoners are being humanely treated can be validated. In the absence of independent verification, their statements are meaningless. We must demand nothing less than oversight and tranparency of these operations.

The military should appoint compliance officers whose job it is to talk to the oversight organizations and bring any problems to the attention of the superiors of the officers running those prisons. This is the model that many businesses use to assure regulatory compliance. It needs to be done yesterday.

The abuse of Iraqi prisoners or any prisoners is the expected outcome of any prison system where there is a lack of oversight and transparency. As Americans, we should DEMAND that American run prisons in Iraq and elsewhere be completely open to inspection by the Red Cross and that Red Cross have access to prisoners and can listen to their complaints. Having outside observers not only protects the prisoners, but also their guards. If the system is open and transparent, then the assurances by the guards that prisoners are being humanely treated can be validated. In the absence of independent verification, their statements are meaningless. We must demand nothing less than oversight and tranparency of these operations.

The military should appoint compliance officers whose job it is to talk to the oversight organizations and bring any problems to the attention of the superiors of the officers running those prisons. This is the model that many businesses use to assure regulatory compliance. It needs to be done yesterday.

ligimos: "The fact that these Iraqi POW's are even alive ...."

Just a correction: this was a prison, not a POW camp. The vast majority were rounded up as civilians. Since there are no civil rights, arrests were performed on anyone for whom an informant fingered. Kind of like how Witches were identified in Salem.

Otherwise, the only thing surprising about the torture was that someone squealed. The US has had a policy of torture-by-proxy throughout the world since Reagan came to power. And starting in late 2001 Amnesty and others have reported torture in US POW camps and prisons in Afghanistan, Gitmo, and Iraq.

Lastly: that really does put the final nail in the coffin for the pre-war justifications, doesn't it? I mean, after the WMD lies were exposed the right wing shifted to the humanitarian justification. Now, over a hundred thousand ruined lives later, we learn that the new boss of Iraq treats people no better than the old one. So much for the humanitarian justification.

Dem: "...we learn that the new boss of Iraq treats people no better than the old one."

Beg pardon? Where are the mass graves -- or, for that matter, the prisoners with their ears cut off? Even given these new outrages and our general criminal neglect of Iraq, the US is still treating it infinitely better than Saddam did, and only a fool could say otherwise.

Unfortunately that isn't enough -- especially given the fact that most Mideast Moslems are trained from birth to strongly dislike and distrust Americans simply because they're non-Moslem. We are in a worldwide dynamite shed -- and these stupid fuckers have now lit a cigarette and casually thrown it away inside the shed. Al Qaida could have wracked its brains for 10,000 years and not designed a recruting poster as effective as a single one of those photos. That cute little line of Kissinger's -- "It was worse than a crime; it was a mistake" -- has always nauseated me; but what's been going on at Abu Ghraib (and no doubt elsewhere) is both a crime AND a mistake, and the latter may end up wreaking vastly more harm than the former.

Charles K. said "?! Is there a division of Haliburton that does this sort of thing?"

Well, if you read Kevin Phillips' new book "American Dynasty" you'll find that there are a lot of things we don't know about outsourcing military activities, beyond the cafeterias. It's a very illuminating book.

DD: "Does anyone think that any of the Arabs interviewed for this story displayed even the slightest hint of rage or shame at the Arabs who burned four American civilian contractors in Fallujah in March?"

Besides the rationalizing, isn't Drezner also making the mistake of assuming that it's easy for us to know what Arabs, in general, think? They don't tend to live in societies where it's so simple to express uninhibited, independent thoughts, nor do they as much access to unfiltered information as we do. So why would anyone assume these particular Arabs hold the beliefs (or that it's necessarily something we should castigate them for, if they do) Drezner assigns them?

Bruce Moomaw: "Al Qaida could have wracked its brains for 10,000 years and not designed a recruting poster as effective as a single one of those photos."

Hmmm. It seems to me rather fanciful to assume that something like this will necessarily have any impact at all. What, you think people in the Middle East were born yesterday?

Also, sometimes, finding out something you have always assumed was true, really is true, can deflate the passions. So who knows?

Finally, there's always Osama's view to consider - anything that makes us the "weak horse," that's what will generate recruits. Perhaps then it won't be what these guys did, but the fact that we visibly make them stop, that will have the effect BM posits.

Well, most of the Arabs being interviewed by our press about this don't sound intimidated at all -- they sound mad as hell. (And, in a few cases, even disappointed -- some of them probably did hope that we might turn out to be a good role model after all).

The Israelis have already spent years trying to work on the assumption that the Arabs will all run off if you go "Boo!" to them. It hasn't worked very well.

Even given these new outrages and our general criminal neglect of Iraq, the US is still treating it infinitely better than Saddam did, and only a fool could say otherwise.

Beg pardon? The US has, since 1991, more or less continuously bombed, shelled, attacked, and killed Iraqis, and the latest installment has been far from bloodless.

Now you may argue that the attacks on Iraq were necessary, you can argue that there were no other alternatives, but you cannot argue that 13 years of armed conflict is treating Iraq "infinitely better" than Saddam did.

It is perfectly consistent and reasonable to hold both of the following beliefs: (i) the acts at the prison are absolutely morally inexcusable; and(ii) many of the people who protest against such acts, ostensibly on universalistic human-rights grounds, do not deserve to be taken seriously because they have no problem with the same acts when somebody else's ox is gored. And yes, the same idea can be applied to commie-hating Klan boosters.

More and more I agree with a bumper sticker I saw recently:

"We're making enemies faster than we can kill them."

Being one who thought going in was a bad idea doesn't help overcome the sense of now being in a situation with no way out.

Declarations of outrage in the Western world are utterly worthless. I claim to be outraged. You claim to be outraged that I am outraged. Than we go home to our families, jobs and mortgages and let "wiser" people decide what US will do.

David Balan,
"It is perfectly consistent and reasonable to hold both of the following beliefs: (i) the acts at the prison are absolutely morally inexcusable; and(ii) many of the people who protest against such acts, ostensibly on universalistic human-rights grounds, do not deserve to be taken seriously because they have no problem with the same acts when somebody else's ox is gored."

That's true, but what's bothersome about Drezner's post is that he presumed that any Arab layperson whose negative reaction to the prison photos was recorded by Western media must fall into your category (ii).
Here's Drezner: "Does anyone think that any of the Arabs interviewed for this story displayed even the slightest hint of rage or shame at the Arabs who burned four American civilian contractors in Fallujah in March?"

See? Drezner takes it for granted that not one of these Arabs showed "even the slightest hint of shame or rage" at the attacks on the contractors. And Drezner gives us no sign that he has any basis whatsoever for such an assumption, other than his assumptions/attitudes/prejudices towards Arabs generally.
See, when we want to support a Republican president, we say that the U.S. can and should use its military to spread democracy, because all people are basically decent and freedom-loving and fair-minded, and anyone who says otherwise is a racist. Then, when some foreigners say things we don't like, we dismiss them as hateful, small-minded, vicious thugs, whose views don't even deserve serious consideration.

Bruce Moomaw,

"It was worse than a crime, it was a blunder" was Talleyrand, not Kissinger, about the murder of the Duc D'Enghien (I believe). I just quoted it on another blog because I think its really applicable here. In fact, I'm bucking for a version of this on a bumper sticker (bush/cheney 04: not just a crime, a blunder) although I think it needs work. The problem is that there is a large group in this country who will continue to fail to recognize the criminality of our acts since, for them, everything we do is excused by "9-11", every murder by every previous murder, every torture by every previous torture. The obscenity of this position, that it is forcing us as a people to fall to the lowest common denominator in which merely being slightly better than saddam (whatever that means) is enough, seems to escape them. Worse than a crime, a blunder is a useful way of pointing out to people that regardless of what the "american street" thinks war and peace in Iraq, and elsewhere in the middle east, is a function of what the "arab street" thinks. Acts must be judged not only on their intentions (the road to hell being paved with them) but rather from their effects. Effect bad? then the act was wrong. Bush and co argue ceaselessly that if the intent of the act was right, the effect will be "right" too. Well, as bob herbert put it so memorably the other day "fantasty must genuflect to reality" at some point. I think pointing out the "blunder" aspect of the war crimes of abu ghraib can get around the american street's defensiveness about what is being done in their name. I hope so, anyway.

Kate

Strictly speaking, The Navigator is correct. It is almost certainly the case that some Arabs disapprove of terrorism against Americans. The unfortunate truth, however, is that there is a good deal of empirical evidence that terrorism against Americans is very popular in the Arab world. There is a liberal imperitive to resist the temptation to demonize outgroups, and there is a liberal imperitive to refrain from most forms of statistical discrimination (i.e., mistreating an Arab that you happen to meet on the grounds that there is a high probability that he endorses terrorism), but there is no imperitive to ignore the plain truth.

I agree that desecrating the dead is bad.

However, it is not as bad as torturing the living.

They are not equivalent acts.

Shooting an enemy hostile and these folks legitimately see the mercs as enemy hostile is allowed under the rules of war

Torturing prisoners is not allowed under the rules of war.

spare me the righteous indignation of the Arab street

Brad, you are only a fair economist and you are a damn poor historian.

A good parallel from History--the slave loving South. Do you think that minds would have been changed if Sherman hadn't burned Atlanta?

The correct answer is, "spare me." The message we has to be driven home every minute of every day--everything about the Arab street is wrong--its religion, its politics, its economics

Read a little VDH

Moe: So flat-out abusing them is the way to win their hearts and minds?

Moe Levine: The message we has to be driven home every minute of every day--everything about the Arab street is wrong--its religion, its politics, its economics

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/423649.html:
An Israeli Arab married to a Gazan is allowed to visit a spouse if they stay in Gaza and don't return home for a minimum period of three months, under new regulations issued by Southern Command Maj. Gen. Dan Harel.

The only thing wrong with Arab street is that US is arming and bankrolling their enemies.

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