Victor Davis Hanson addresses the recent crimes by American guards at Abu Ghraib:
The guards’ alleged crimes are not only repugnant but stupid as well. At a time when it is critical to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, a few renegade corrections officers have endangered the lives of thousands of their fellow soldiers in the field. Marines around Fallujah take enormous risks precisely because they do not employ the tactics of the fedayeen, who fire from minarets and use civilians as human shields.Yet without minimizing the seriousness of these apparent transgressions, we need to take a breath, get a grip, and put the sordid incident in some perspective beyond its initial 24-hour news cycle.
His argument:
- Investigation are not yet complete.
- The self-correcting mechanisms of the U.S. government and the American free press are already in full throttle.
- We must keep the allegations in historical context: “American soldiers are not ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Kuwait or executing Kurdish civilians, crimes that in the past went largely unnoticed in the Middle East.”
- There is an asymmetry about the coverage of the incident, an imbalance and double standard that have been predictable throughout this entire brutal war: “The Arab world — where the mass-murdering Osama bin Laden is often canonized — is shocked by a pyramid of nude bodies and faux-electric prods, but has so far expressed less collective outrage in its media when the charred corpses of four Americans were poked and dismembered by cheering crowds in Fallujah.”
- We are now in an uncertain peace in Iraq. “War is hell, and those who do not endure it are not entirely aware of the demons that are unleashed, and thus should hold their moral outrage until the full account of the incident is investigated and adjudicated.”