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Subject: NYTimes.com Article: Clash of Civilizations
Date: Thu, 13 May 2004 20:29:44 -0400 (EDT)
The article below from NYTimes.com
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Clash of Civilizations
May 13, 2004
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
Testifying before the Senate yesterday, General Richard
Myers admitted that we're checkmated in Iraq.
"There is no way to militarily lose in Iraq," he said,
describing the generals' consensus. "There is also no way
to militarily win in Iraq."
Talk about the sound of one hand clapping. And they say
John Kerry is on both sides of issues.
Sounding like Mr. Kerry, General Myers summed up: "This
process has to be internationalized. The U.N. has to play
the governance role. That's how we're, in my view,
eventually going to win."
The administration's demented quest to conquer Arab hearts
and minds has dissolved in a torrent of pornography
denigrating other parts of the Arab anatomy. George Bush,
who swept into office on a cloud of moral umbrage, now has
his own sex scandal - one with far greater implications
than titillating cigar jokes.
The Bush hawks, so fixated on making the Middle East look
more like America, have made America look un-American.
Should we really be reduced to defending ourselves by
saying at least we don't behead people?
Gripped in a "I can't look at them - I've got to look at
them" state of mind, lawmakers grimly filed into private
screening rooms on the Hill to check out the 1,800
grotesque images of sex, humiliation and torture.
"They're disgusting," Senator Dianne Feinstein told me. "If
somebody wanted to plan a clash of civilizations, this is
how they'd do it. These pictures play into every stereotype
of America that Arabs have: America as debauched, America
as hypocrites.
"Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz act like they know all
the answers, almost like a divine right," she said. "They
don't have a divine right, and they are wrong."
After 9/11, America had the support and sympathy of the
world. Now, awash in digital evidence of uncivilized
behavior, America has careered into a war of civilizations.
The pictures were clearly meant to use the codebook of
Muslim anxieties about nudity and sexual and gender
humiliation to break down the prisoners.
Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell said some photographs
seemed to show Iraqi women being commanded to expose their
breasts - such debasement, after a war that President Bush
partly based on women's rights.
The problem, of course, is that the war in Iraq started
with lies - that Saddam's W.M.D. were endangering our
security and that Saddam was linked to Al Qaeda and 9/11.
In a public relations move that cheapens the heroism of
soldiers, the Pentagon merged the medals for the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, giving the G.W.O.T. medal, for Global
War on Terrorism, in both wars to reinforce the idea that
we had to invade Iraq to quell terrorism. The truth is that
our invasion of Iraq spurred terrorism there and around the
world.
That initial deception - and headlong rush to throw off
international conventions and old alliances, and
namby-pamby institutions like the U.N. and the Red Cross -
led straight to the abuse of Abu Ghraib. Now the question
is whether the C.I.A. tortured Al Qaeda operatives.
Officials blurred the lines to justify ideological
decisions, calling every Iraqi who opposed us a
"terrorist"; conducting rough interrogations, perhaps to
find the nonexistent W.M.D. so they would not look foolish;
rolling all opposition into one scary terrorist ball that
did not require sensitivity to the Geneva Conventions or
"humanitarian do-gooders," to use the phrase of Senator
James Inhofe, a Republican.
Senator Fritz Hollings made it clear yesterday that Rummy
has left us undermanned and undertrained in Iraq - another
factor in the torture scandal. "Now, in a country of 25
million, you're trying to secure it with 135,000," he
scolded Mr. Rumsfeld, adding: "We're trying to win the
hearts and minds as we're killing them and torturing them."
At least, he said sarcastically, Gen. William Westmoreland
never asked a Vietcong general to take the town, "like we
have for Falluja. We've asked the enemy general to take the
town."
The hawks, who promised us garlands in Iraq, should have
recalled the words of the historian Daniel Boorstin, who
warned that planning for the future without a sense of
history is like planting cut flowers.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/13/opinion/13DOWD.html?ex=1085494583&ei=1&en=fe4825a57ba38aad
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