Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

The Ideal America

(Reprinted from the issue of May 13, 2004)

The bad news from Iraq keeps coming relentlessly. Now we learn that American interrogators have been torturing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners for the sheer fun of it, even taking and swapping photos of the sexual degradation they’ve inflicted.

President Bush was outraged, and tried to make some amends by appearing on Arab television to apologize and to affirm that these horrors “do not reflect” the values of the American people. But this will be a hard message to sell the Arabs.

I presume the publicity that these torments have already received makes it unnecessary to describe them in detail here. Suffice it that obscenity is quite typical of American “values” today, and so is the feminism that placed women at the scene of these spectacles, savoring the utter humiliation of naked Arab men. These are things America is notorious for in the Muslim world.

We may prefer to think of them as deviations, but they are now part of American law, culture, and commerce. Bush is speaking for an ideal America that has become little more than an abstraction. If conservatives deplore them at home, how can we expect Muslims to regard them as unrepresentative of the real America of today? Why is it that the flaws we ourselves see in the American character become mere “propaganda” when Muslims too notice them?

Bush is also trying to abstract his “pre-emptive” war on Iraq, which he still considers defensive, from these “excesses,” which he sees as extraneous and contrary to his intentions. He may be quite sincere, but it hardly matters. To an Iraqi who rejects his justifications, the whole war is aggressive and the killing of Iraqi soldiers, not to mention countless civilians, is no less outrageous than the abuse of prisoners; it’s all of a piece.

From that point of view, it’s absurd for Bush to ask the Arabs to try to understand the whole thing from his perspective and to appreciate our good intentions. The most detached Arab philosopher would find this hard to swallow, and the Arab world isn’t in a philosophical mood right now. It knows that the American troops are going to stay in Iraq indefinitely, that self-government is a fiction, and that our protestations of benevolence to the Arabs are hypocritical.

War always opens a Pandora’s box of unforeseeable and uncontrollable evils. This is why I always regarded Bush’s eagerness for war with foreboding. He approached the prospect not only with callous indifference to the inevitable suffering it would cause the Iraqis — that was the foreseeable part — but with utter optimism about the aftermath.

In the real world you have to take responsibility for the consequences of your acts. When you set off a chain reaction of violence, which is what war always is, it’s no use pleading that you didn’t intend every ricochet.

The America Bush led into war wasn’t his ideal America of Christian democracy, but the real America of overweening government, colossal weapons, staggering debt, dubious morality, confused purpose, tangled alliances, and imperfectly disciplined military personnel. As always the reality was misrepresented by simple, reassuring symbols, like photos of American soldiers being welcomed by the natives and tenderly holding little children in protective poses. Such misleading images, however, conformed perfectly to Bush’s dream of war.

Now we are seeing other images, some of which have been smuggled past official censorship. Only a few days before the torture story broke we saw illicit photos of the coffins of American soldiers, and Ted Koppel was fiercely denounced for reading the names of the American dead on ABC’s Nightline. Now Rush Limbaugh accuses the news media of overplaying the torture scandal; he actually says this is a mere liberal ploy to distract us from the miseries of John Kerry’s limping campaign!

Apparently it’s the patriotic duty of journalism to reinforce official optimism about the war, to pretend that everything is going as planned. Any departure from the official line gives aid and comfort to the enemy. The facts must be hidden from the American public, if the enemy might make use of those facts. Never mind that “the enemy” — the entire Muslim world, it seems — doesn’t depend on the American media for all its information.

Luckily for us, the Arabs are still weak. Imagine what would happen to us if they had the power to avenge what America has done to them. In a generation or two we may learn the hard way.

Meanwhile, even an invincible empire ought to learn the lesson that its wars shouldn’t be based on best-case scenarios. Brave words like “resolve” and “sacrifice” didn’t tell us what to expect. We had no inkling of the shame the torture revelations have brought upon us. Bush didn’t warn us that we might wind up more profoundly hated than we already were. Is that an acceptable price to pay for whatever we are supposed to be gaining from the War on Terror?

Chesterton observed, “The real American is all right. It is the ideal American who is all wrong.” That was a great insight in its day, but times have changed.
 
Kerry’s Compromises

Democrats are worried about the Kerry campaign. Bad news for Bush — and there has been no shortage of it — isn’t translating into good news for Kerry. He is simply an inert candidate, a dull liberal who, like all the rest, is trying to blur his image. He rails against Bush while minimizing their real differences.

Given his famous history as a Vietnam protester, you might expect Kerry at least to oppose the Iraq war. Nothing of the kind. He merely wants a vaguely “multilateral” approach, which Bush too is now seeking, and he is even more committed to supporting a certain Mideastern “democracy” than Bush is. Antiwar Democrats, the sort who favored Howard Dean in the primaries, are frustrated with Kerry’s compromises and may defect to Ralph Nader — if they bother voting at all.

Issues aside, why do the Democrats keep nominating such terrible bores? Bill Clinton was an exception, but look at their other recent nominees: Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, and now Kerry. This is a party that ran out of gas a generation ago, and today it’s stuck with all its old socialist commitments and, worse, socialist reflexes. Kerry is currently shouting about a thrilling new federal education policy he envisions, but nobody’s listening.

By the way, I’m informed that Kerry’s wife, despite her private qualms about abortion, lately delivered an unqualified pro-abortion speech to a feminist group. Just when I was starting to like her. But the Democrats’ party line on this is absolutely rigid, so the candidate’s wife has to stand by her man.

Kerry himself unblushingly adopts Bill Clinton’s line that abortion should be “safe, legal — and rare.” And just what steps would this conscientious Catholic take to ensure its rarity in a country that now sees about a million abortions a year?

I’ll say one thing for Kerry: He is, in his own way, a frequent communicant. On any given Sunday, he takes communion in whatever church he happens to find himself in.


A new book shows the lighter side of Joe Stalin. My monthly newsletter, SOBRAN’S, takes a look at this hitherto unknown party animal. If you have not seen my newsletter yet, give my office a call at 800-513-5053 and request a free sample, or better yet, subscribe for two years for just $85. New subscribers get two gifts with their subscription. More details can be found at the Subscription page of my website.

Already a subscriber? Consider a gift subscription for a priest, friend, or relative.

Joseph Sobran