The PR PL War

Obviously Kuznicki and I disagree on most matters related to the war. I find his comments about the war to usually be emotionalistic and irrational, and I am usually offended by the fact that he focuses his outrage not on our enemies but on those who are fighting for his freedom. I tend to avoid the subject because I think disputes like this among the writers of a single blog are not very enjoyable, but for Kuznicki to say that I am “endors[ing] bringing up al Qaeda as a way of dodging the subject of prisoner mistreatment in American-run facilities” is intolerable, absurd, and offensive. I have never done any such thing, and I expect Kuznicki to apologize for that allegation immediately.

What I have said—echoing Friedman—is that it is shameful that the administration is doing so little to focus attention on the real bad guys in this war, and yes, there are real bad guys, who really do things that are astonishingly barbaric. The American war effort has done some awful and some patently unconstitutional things, including the Guantanamo Bay detention and the treatment of some prisoners such as Jose Padilla (from what we know, of course; given military secrecy, we can never be sure we have the whole picture, but the picture we do have is pretty bad on these matters). Yet because I don’t lace my posts with slavering hostility to the Dark Imperial American War Machine, which is out there on a mission to tear the toenails out of tribes of Innocent Muslims, who would otherwise spend their days in pastoral piety, wishing the blessings of Allah upon us all—why, then I must be a monster like some character in Dr. Strangelove. As Glenn Reynolds recently put it, “It is not enough to have the right opinions. You must have them at the right time, and you must express them in a way that reflects people's desire to feel good about themselves.”

Kuznicki’s posts on the war have a single theme: we are wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Of course, the reality is that we are not wrong. The occupation of Iraq is going very badly because it has been badly planned out and poorly executed, and that is wrong. The invasion of Iraq on the premise that we could simply bring freedom to people who do not believe it, was very wrong. And, to repeat myself yet again, the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib was wrong. I have never denied these things. What I have refused to do  is to play it Kuznicki’s way—what I see as the easy way—and to remain silent about the vastly worse abuses that go on at the hands of our enemies. This is not a red herring, it is intellectual perspective. There is more than one kind of bias, and to focus constant indignation on the United States, which is on the right side in this war, while remaining silent about the vastly worse, and far more intentional, crimes committed by the other side, is one of the more insidious forms of it.

My point, and Friedman’s, is that this sort of bias is doing us a great deal of harm in the PR war. The Arab world is united (and understandably so) about things like Guantanamo Bay. But most Americans appear to have forgotten about things like Spain, March 11, 2004, or the attack on the Indian parliament in December, 2001—and have come to tune out the murders going on routinely in Iraq. Worse still, some appear to have accepted those murders as somehow legitimate responses to the occupation of Iraq. Now, whatever may be said about the occupation of Iraq, it is not the act of power-hungry imperialists as the Forces of Hysteria would have us believe. It is an attempt, misguided as it might be, to bring democracy to an enslaved people. <strike>(We all remember how reluctant Kuznicki was to applaud, grudgingly, the downfall of the bloodthirsty dictator of Iraq. To me, that reluctance is far worse than my alleged softness on torture.)</strike>* My point in the post was that it is outrageous that a large portion of the American populace has come to accept the outrages that go on in Iraq as though they are the regular turn of events, or as if we are not entitled to expect anything better of the people of the Middle East, or as if they are somehow the rightful response to American occupation. And that outrageous outcome can be laid entirely at the feet of the Bush Administration, which has failed to focus the legitimate indignation of the western world on those who are responsible for these attacks (and which has so often focused indignation on its mere domestic partisan opponents). Whatever else can be said of Iraq right now, it has a unique opportunity to prove that the Middle Eastern, Arab, and Muslim peoples can come together to create a free, democratic society for the betterment of all. But that opportunity is being destroyed, not by Americans, but by the forces of radical Islam—and I believe the Bush Administration has failed to pin that blame on the parties responsible for it. That was my point.

He insists he’s not positing moral equivalence, but Kuznicki’s admiration of the often hysterical Andrew Sullivan, his quotations from characters like Glenn Greenwald, and his hostility to such blogs as Little Green Footballs, are all typical of those who, for whatever reason, would rather hit the United States repeatedly for its failures—and real failures they are, I repeat, again…—than to focus on the wrongs done by our enemies. What else is moral equivalence? On one side, Kuznicki thinks I’m soft on torture because I’m not out there denouncing it day in and day out like Cato the Elder on Carthage, but to me, the wan disclaimer, “Bin Laden is worse,” seems a lot more questionable.

The bottom line: my point was a correct one, and accusations that I’m trying to deflect attention away from the subject of torture is offensive and wrong. But I think that, as awful as it is that America has descended to such tactics, they should not be the primary subject of our attention at this time, when we are in a war against an enemy that wants to kill us, and that is truly and genuinely evil.

*-Update: Kuznicki rightly notes that he was not reluctant except insofar as he opposes the death penalty. On this point, I apologize; I was confusing him with another blogger. I retract this point. But I do keep this in mind: "I guess it’s obligatory to say something about how bad Saddam Hussein was. Otherwise I might seem like a defeatist." Oh, yes. Because it's just a red herring to suggest that Hussein was a bad guy.

Update 2: Kuznicki seven months ago making the same point I was making in my Tom Friedman post:

During the entire Cold War, demonstrably evil people had thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons, and they pointed them directly at the liberal nations of the world. People like Stalin, Khrushchev, and Mao. Monsters. Somehow, we kept relatively cool. We didn’t go around waterboarding people or asserting a president’s unreviewable right to strip citizens of their habeas corpus protections. We did a far better job back then of insisting that there was a moral difference between us and them. There were some definite slips in the Cold War, but the kind of grace under pressure shown more generally back then has often been lacking from the panicky response to 9/11.

See, that's not a red herring.