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Aiding and abetting

Last week Rush was merely delusional, blowing off Abu Ghraib as either a “good time” or as a form of NEA-sponsored performance art.  Now he’s bordering on treason.

I’m not just throwing this word around.  Think of it this way: it’s one thing for the US to have kept Saddam’s torture chambers open for business, raping and murdering random Iraqis.  That’s quite bad enough.  And it’s another thing for our highest military brass, all the way up to the Secretary of Defense, to blow off the Taguba report because they didn’t have time in their busy schedules to read the executive summary.  That’s more than bad enough.  But now look where we are:  the story finally breaks, and the American right responds by . . .

-- denying the severity of the charges

-- parsing the fine moral distinction between “abuse” and “torture”

-- insisting that the incidents involve only a handful of soldiers

-- blathering about how war is not a nice business

-- suggesting that the US media should have suppressed the story

-- whining that liberals are using Abu Ghraib to undermine the war effort, as if Abu Ghraib doesn’t do that all by itself.

That’s more than more than bad enough.  Because there really is only one legitimate response here, you wingnuts and toadies and moral reprobates.  It goes something like this: you make a complete apology to the Iraqi people.  If you have any supervisory relation to the soliders at Abu Ghraib, you resign immediately (you too, Rummy).  You promise-- and deliver-- a full and complete investigation.  You shut down, and then demolish, Abu Ghraib-- as you should have done a year ago.  You make some pathetic effort to try to compensate victims and their families. 

And that’s just the beginning.

Remember, there is no other remaining justification for this war: the WMD claims are thoroughly discredited (think of Bush as Geraldo Rivera standing outside Al Capone’s tomb), and the Saddam-Osama link (via Prague) exists only in the fevered, decaying brains of ultraright wingnuts like Cheney and Laurie Mylroie.  Since the collapse of the WMD argument, the right has fallen back to the “Saddam was bad” position, and argued that this was a war of liberation.  Abu Ghraib renders that argument obscene.

And so, the third worst thing the American right can do, under the circumstances, is to belittle the importance of Abu Ghraib.  The second worst thing is to make fun of it, as Rush has been doing.  And the worst, the effing worst, is to hail it as “pretty thoughtful.” Yep, here’s Rush, now scraping the very bottom of the moral barrel:

“All right, so we’re at war with these people. And they’re in a prison where they’re being softened up for interrogation. And we hear that the most humiliating thing you can do is make one Arab male disrobe in front of another. Sounds to me like it’s pretty thoughtful. Sounds to me in the context of war this is pretty good intimidation� and especially if you put a woman in front of them and then spread those pictures around the Arab world. And we’re sitting here, ‘Oh my God, they’re gonna hate us! Oh no! What are they gonna think of us?’ I think maybe the other perspective needs to be at least considered. Maybe they’re gonna think we are serious. Maybe they’re gonna think we mean it this time. Maybe they’re gonna think we’re not gonna kowtow to them. Maybe the people who ordered this are pretty smart. Maybe the people who executed this pulled off a brilliant maneuver. Nobody got hurt. Nobody got physically injured. But boy there was a lot of humiliation of people who are trying to kill us-- in ways they hold dear.

“Sounds pretty effective to me if you look at us in the right context.”

Never mind the fact that every word here is an obscenity worthy of the stiffest FCC fine Michael Powell can dream up (yeah, like that’s gonna happen).  Forget the morality of it.  Think instead in crassly pragmatic terms: first, Rush is slandering US troops.  Second, in justifying the rape, torture, and murder of random civilians, Rush is giving Iraqis-- and Arabs everywhere-- a rationale for the rape, torture, and murder of Americans. He is undermining the war effort-- not liberals, not CBS, not Seymour Hersh. 

Just imagine how this would play on al-Jazeera: not only do the Americans rape and pillage; it’s even worse than that-- first they laugh about it, and then they set about defending it.  (To the wingnuts like Rush who scream that we shouldn’t be concerned with what they think over at al-Jazeera: this was your war of liberation, buddy. You’re supposed to care what the actual “liberatees” think about it.)

Rush is literally jeopardizing American troops and American interests.  He is giving aid and comfort to our worst enemies.  He should be yanked off the airwaves immediately and placed in the Ezra Pound Memorial Wing at St. Elizabeth’s.  Yes, it’s too good for him, I know, but at this point almost anything would be.

Posted by on 05/10 at 04:36 AM

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