Punked

by digby

The excellent Steve Benen, pinch hitting over at Washington Monthly, highlights this rather stunning story from the LA Times in which we learn that the Army is eliminating the prohibition against “humiliating and degrading” treatment from the new edition of the field manual:

The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans “humiliating and degrading treatment,” according to knowledgeable military officials, a step that would mark a further, potentially permanent, shift away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.

The decision could culminate a lengthy debate within the Defense Department but will not become final until the Pentagon makes new guidelines public, a step that has been delayed. However, the State Department fiercely opposes the military’s decision to exclude Geneva Convention protections and has been pushing for the Pentagon and White House to reconsider, the Defense Department officials acknowledged.

Benen says:

I can’t help but wonder if Bush administration officials know or care about how this undermines our standing and credibility in the world. It’s simply breathtaking. As Kevin put it a while back, “It’s simply impossible to persuade the rest of the world that we’re the good guys as long as we persist in plainly repugnant behavior.”

The problem is that they, and I assume many in the pentagon, believe the exact opposite. They think that “being tough” and “sending the right message” will make the enemy put its tail between its legs and run for the hills. That’s the simple truth of it. And that idea is what’s permeated into the military ranks in Iraq and elsewhere. When Cheney said “take the gloves off” he meant it. And people believed it. And that led us directly to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and now the horror of Haditha.

Newsweek’s story on the subject this week doesn’t really shed any new light on the story, but it ends with one hell of a speculation:

MacGregor also faulted U.S. generals for not accompanying platoon and squad leaders as they patrolled—to better understand their environment and what they needed to survive in it. Had the generals done so, writes MacGregor, they would have known what a sergeant on patrol in Ramadi meant when he told a journalist, “You can have my job. It’s easy. You just have to drive around all day and wait for someone to bomb you. Thing is, you have to hate Arabs.”

Left to their own devices, grunts sometimes improvise. It is possible that Kilo Company was determined to “leave a calling card,” which is to say, to warn Haditha that IEDs would be met with heavy retribution. It’s an old and primitive counter-insurgency tactic. Long ago, the Romans used it against barbarians.

Romans and conservatives are very big on “sending messages.” They like to make examples of people; it’s one of their favorite authoritarian tactics. And executing children sends a hell of a message, no doubt about it. No gloves anywhere to be seen in that operation. The “humiliating and degrading” treatment at Abu Ghraib, the torture at Bagram and Gitmo and god knows where else, the kidnapping and renditions, and yes, the massacre of civilians including children, is not a matter of incompetence or misunderstanding or the fog of war. It’s the plan.

In this famous essay called “World War IV,” neocon king Norman Podhoretz spells it all out. The US has been soft for more than thirty years. Even St Ronnie doesn’t get a pass (for “cutting and running” after the barracks bombing in Lebanon.) We have invited this malevolent threat to attack us because we have been weak. After recounting American failures to “get tough” over the course of the last thirty years, he concludes:

The sheer audacity of what bin Laden went on to do on September 11 was unquestionably a product of his contempt for American power. Our persistent refusal for so long to use that power against him and his terrorist brethren—or to do so effectively whenever we tried—reinforced his conviction that we were a nation on the way down, destined to be defeated by the resurgence of the same Islamic militancy that had once conquered and converted large parts of the world by the sword.

As bin Laden saw it, thousands or even millions of his followers and sympathizers all over the Muslim world were willing, and even eager, to die a martyr’s death in the jihad, the holy war, against the “Great Satan,” as the Ayatollah Khomeini had called us. But, in bin Laden’s view, we in the West, and especially in America, were all so afraid to die that we lacked the will even to stand up for ourselves and defend our degenerate way of life.

Bin Laden was never reticent or coy in laying out this assessment of the United States. In an interview on CNN in 1997, he declared that “the myth of the superpower was destroyed not only in my mind but also in the minds of all Muslims” when the Soviet Union was defeated in Afghanistan. That the Muslim fighters in Afghanistan would almost certainly have failed if not for the arms supplied to them by the United States did not seem to enter into the lesson he drew from the Soviet defeat. In fact, in an interview a year earlier he had belittled the United States as compared with the Soviet Union. “The Russian soldier is more courageous and patient than the U.S. soldier,” he said then. Hence, “Our battle with the United States is easy compared with the battles in which we engaged in Afghanistan.”

Becoming still more explicit, bin Laden wrote off the Americans as cowards. Had Reagan not taken to his heels in Lebanon after the bombing of the Marine barracks in 1983? And had not Clinton done the same a decade later when only a few American Rangers were killed in Somalia, where they had been sent to participate in a “peacekeeping” mission? Bin Laden did not boast of this as one of his victories, but a State Department dossier charged that al Qaeda had trained the terrorists who ambushed the American servicemen. (The ugly story of what happened to us in Somalia was told in the film version of Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down, which reportedly became Saddam Hussein’s favorite movie.)

Bin Laden summed it all up in a third interview he gave in 1998:

After leaving Afghanistan the Muslim fighters headed for Somalia and prepared for a long battle thinking that the Americans were like the Russians. The youth were surprised at the low morale of the American soldiers and realized, more than before, that the American soldier was a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat.

Naturally, they believed him. He wouldn’t lie would he? So America simply had to respond to bin Laden’s trash talk by showing the world that we are one tough mofo of a superpower that would invade any country that looked at us sideways. Never mind that bin Laden was full of shit about everything and that 9/11 would only succeed if we did exactly what we ended up doing. Incensed by his taunts, the administration rose up like an angry giant and began to flail about incoherently. That’ll show him who’s boss.

And after everything that’s happened since, Bush still believes it. From March of 2006:

Ours is an enemy which has embraced an ideology — an ideology of hatred, an ideology that is totalitarian in nature: they decide if you can worship and how you worship; they decide whether or not your children can go to school; they decide this, they decide that. They stand exactly the opposite of the United States of America. They have expressed their tactics for the world to see. They believe that those of us living in democracies are weak, and flaccid. It’s just a matter of time, they believe, if they continue to exert pressure that we will retreat from the world. That’s what they want.

The vaunted neo-conservative intellectuals have a simplistic, shoolyard view of the world based on what appears to be a very simplistic, schoolyard psychology that very much appealed to the boy-man that had been installed in the white house when bin Laden struck on 9/11. What serendipity! It is this puerile psychological misfire that united them with the feverish one handed typists of the 101st keyboarders — all threats, no matter how small or insignificant at the time, must be met with crude brute force lest someone taunt you about your small cojones. The real threat is the appearance of weakness.

The interesting thing about this, of course, is that very few of these people have ever put any of that into practice in their own lives — this belief exists in an abstract realm of fantasy — a pageant to be performed by others. (When you read Podhoretz’s piece you can’t help but be struck by all the vainglorious pride he takes in the physical courage of others.) Yet they also need to maintain a sort of religious fiction about themselves as being purveyors of democracy and freedom — concepts that don’t ordinarily lend themselves to barbaric message sending.

And that is how we found ourselves invading and occupying (and killing and torturing) to prove we are good and they are evil. And it’s why with every failure, every misstep, every hypocrisy and war crime, this braindead macho policy makes America far more vulnerable today than we were on 9/11. This mistaken belief that bin Laden attacked us because he thought we were weak — has made us weak. Virtually the entire American political establishment got punked by Osama bin Laden’s trash talking and they still don’t get it. With every impotent “message” of toughness we send, the more we play into his hands.

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