Secondhand Blowback
Funny how attitudes change when the provocation comes from the news media instead of Republican foreign policy.
The latest meme from the pro-war side says that the media -- 60 Minutes in particular -- should have sat on the Abu Ghraib pictures because airing them has inflamed the Muslim world, and will likely spark retribution against U.S. troops and American citizens -- see Nick Berg.
Jonah Goldberg's latest column contains this sentence:
"Well, CBS' scoop has gotten someone killed and there will be more deaths, on both sides, as a result of this story before it becomes history.Goldberg and others have suggested that a simple description of the pictures and abuses would have been sufficient, without airing the photos. I disagree.
Human rights groups have been reporting abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo for months. The military has known about Abu Ghraib since January. We heard nothing of any courts martial between then and now. Then, less than a week after 60 Minutes broke the story, the Pentagon announces the first round of charges. I doubt that's mere coincidence.
These charges against the press are all the odder considering that conservatives were quick to point out after the abuses came to light that we're different from Iraq and much of the rest of the Middle East in that we expose these kinds of things, we throw light on them, and we then hold responsible those who were accountible (I agree, by the way). You can't make that point, then follow up with an argument against releasing the photos to the public in the first place.
The pictures were needed to get our attention, which was necessary for us to demand accountability from our government and our military.
I don't doubt that those pictures will further inflame Muslim ire. I don't doubt that they'll get plenty more Americans killed. But that abuse -- even filmed and taped abuse -- would crop up somewhere in a fighting force of some 130,000 troops was inevitable. Just the law of averages that you'll get some bad eggs. Our military and political leaders should have anticipated and calculated that risk into the original decision to invade Iraq. War is ugly. It spawns ugly pictures. Ugly pictures don't win us friends. Which is (merely one reason) why we ought to be awfully selective about when and where we go to war in the first place.
It's looking more and more like the abuses at Abu Ghraib were far more widespread than we'd like to believe. Reports of the latest round of pictures suggest that the abuse wasn't the result of expressed or implied military policy, but of massive, wholesale dereliction of duty and lack of supervision from commanding officers. We had truck drivers, restaurant managers, and auto mechanics supervising POWs and captured combatants -- folks with little or no training whatsoever in what they were being asked to do. Anyone who's taken a 100-level psych course has read about the Stanford Prison Experiment. Why were these people assigned to guard the prison? Are we stretched that thin?
But I digress.
My point here is that actions either have consequences, or they don't. If CBS should have considered anti-American blowback when deciding whether or not to air those photos, our elected leaders ought to keep the same thing in mind when deciding to what extent we should fund/support Israel, what Arab country we ought to invade next, and when and where to position our troops in the Middle East.
It's unfathomable to me that considering how our actions might resonate with people who don't much like us should factor into whether news executives decide to hold our military accountable, but not into how, when, and where we use that same military in the first place.