I know, I promised more on the Anderson decision, but. . . .
I ran across this by chance, following links from a post by Josh Marshall trying to set the record straight after Glenn Reynolds misquoted and skewed his comments on "collateral damage" as it applied to Iraq.
Gregory Djerejian quite rightly takes Reynolds to task in this post, but what struck me is the genesis of the whole thing:
This OpEd in the NY Post (where else?) by John Podhoretz is just scary as hell:
Could World War II have been won by Britain and the United States if the two countries did not have it in them to firebomb Dresden and nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Didn't the willingness of their leaders to inflict mass casualties on civilians indicate a cold-eyed singleness of purpose that helped break the will and the back of their enemies? Didn't that singleness of purpose extend down to the populations in those countries in those days, who would have and did support almost any action at any time that would lead to the deaths of Germans and Japanese?
What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn't kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn't the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?
First off, as Djerejian quick correctly points out, the comparison is not apt: Germany and Japan were the aggressors in World War II, quite blatantly. Their attacks on Britain and China were unprovoked, brutal, and more broadly destructive than our responses turned out to be. In fact, although Podhoretz doesn't mention Dresden or Hiroshima by name (although, as I find typical of most rabid right-wingers, it's all in the subtext*), by comparison to what he is suggesting (even though his suggestion is only theoretical [nudge, nudge, wink, wink]) those were surgically precise demonstrations of what we could do if the Axis powers didn't capitulate. There is also the fact that we live in a post WWII, post-Holocaust world. We probably would not intern Japanese-Americans at this point. (Well, most of us wouldn't, except for Michelle Malkin.)
In Iraq we are the aggressors in a war of choice (the reasons for which have never been adequately explained).
What Podhoretz is discussing, as though it were the price of avocados, is genocide.
As Djerejian points out:
Are we now to stoop to the level of our worst enemies (it is the militias of Moktada al-Sadr, after all, who are slaughtering young Sunni males willy-nilly), pondering politely as if an interesting academic conundrum, with arguments ostensibly of equal merit on both sides, whether we should have fought the war in Iraq by exterminating hundreds of thousands of middle-aged male Sunnis? How then does this make us different than Saddam? How then does this make humanity different in the post-Auschwitz era? What have we learned? How then can we believe in progress, and decency, and history not doomed to cyclical savageries?
Podhoretz is a respected conservative commentator (in some circles, anyway). I wish I could think he was just having a bad day, but it's a sentiment I have seen echoed to many times in too many places, from the comments in freeperland to NRO. This is, to the neocons, a legitimate policy proposal, in line with the idea of tactical nuclear strikes against Iran (at a time when our government was doing its best to exacerbate the tensions there).
What the hell are these people thinking?
I can only echo what I have said in response to people making excuses for Abu Ghraib and Gitmo: it's not about them, it's about us and who we are. The minute it becomes about them, we've lost.
Do read Djerejian's entire piece -- strangely enough, I agree with him, which I didn't think would ever happen.
* Someone remarked that liberals and progressives don't have to talk in code because they don't advocate ideas that the majority of people instinctively find morally repulsive. I wish I could remember who that was.
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