BUSH THE INFIDEL
May 13, 2004
by Joe Sobran
Once you've killed a certain number of people, even
with the best will in the world, it becomes awkward to
make the cheerful admission, "I goofed." Halfway through
his river of blood, Macbeth reflects that going back
would be as tedious as going all the way across.
Actually, it turns out that he hasn't even gone halfway
yet.
This is why President Bush will "stay the course" in
Iraq. Forget oil, money, power, and even reelection: The
deepest vested interest is guilt. Bush has done things he
can't bear to renounce, no matter how costly to America
continuing them may yet become.
Now the pictures from Abu Ghraib -- merry American
girls teasing naked Arab men, Arab women forced to bare
their breasts, and the rest of it -- threaten to undo all
the good will we've so painstakingly built up by bombing
Arab cities and starving Arab children. Life is so
unfair.
The photos have added obscene insults to ghastly
injuries, but Bush and Donald Rumsfeld are trying to
insist on a pettifogging distinction: that the injuries
inflicted by war promote democracy and freedom, while the
insults shown in the pictures are contrary to American
"values."
Some churlish Arabs find this distinction hard to
swallow. The values of today's America are no longer the
wholesome ones expressed by Walt Disney, Norman Rockwell,
and Ozzie and Harriet; we now live in the land of Bill
Clinton, Larry Flynt, and, by a natural extension,
Lynndie England.
And the hell of it is, from Bush's point of view,
that the insults are proving more costly than the
injuries. The desecration of the body, whether a dead
American body in Fallujah or a live Muslim body in Abu
Ghraib, is peculiarly inflammatory.
So with poor Nick Berg. His murder might have been
taken in stride, had it been done by, say, a conventional
bullet to the head. But the severing of his head arouses
a revulsion so deep we can hardly express it -- as it was
meant to. Presumably his killers, among themselves, talk
like our hawks of the air waves: "This is war! The enemy
doesn't play by the Marquis of Queensbury rules, so why
should we? The only thing those people understand is
force."
Berg's decapitation did give Bush a chance to step
back into the pulpit of moral indignation the Abu Ghraib
disclosures had made it awkward for him to occupy. Like
Clinton clutching his Bible on the way to a tryst, Bush
is most comfortable in his pose as champion of morality,
intoning homilies about freedom, democracy, and
terrorism. He assures us that there was "no justification
whatsoever" for cutting off Berg's head -- as if the
country were divided over the issue.
Only a man out of touch with reality could suppose
that there remains any hope of charming the Arab-Muslim
world with the talisman of American democracy now. It was
a lost cause even before the Abu Ghraib revelations; now
it's less than a wistful hope -- it's a mad fantasy.
Yet Bush argues that the unfathomable rage his war
has created in the Arab world justifies the war itself.
Every new act of terrorism it provokes proves the need to
finish the war on terrorism. "We will complete our
mission," Bush says -- an ironic comment on his own claim
of a year ago: "Mission accomplished."
Berg's murder, he says, shows the "nature" of the
enemy. But the enemy thinks the war and the degrading
tortures -- "abuses," as Rumsfeld prefers to call them --
show the nature of the American mission. It could hardly
be clearer that the Arab-Muslim world sees Bush as
anything but its deliverer. It sees him as the infidel
writ large.
But our mission must continue, Bush insists: "Their
intention is to shake our will." Now is the time for
American "resolve." This is no time to admit a colossal
mistake, let alone confess guilt. Public support for his
war implicates everyone in the responsibility. That's why
Bush has to keep insisting that his cause is righteous,
even if it never achieves its purpose. No wonder that, as
this sinks in, public support is slipping.
In terms of its original stated goals, the Iraq war
is a failure. Bush's foreign policy might be clinically
described as autistic -- in its self-absorption, its
social blindness, even its linguistic dysfunction. Fate
has delivered enormous power to a very strange man.
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