Accusation fatigue
Tigerhawk
It is enormously frustrating to the left -- and even fairly mainstream Democrats (to the extent that they are not "left") -- that the average American does not care very much about Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, or any number of other "atrocities" and "crimes" allegedly committed by America's soldiers and intelligence officers. The average American does not care even though the left has inflated its rhetoric beyond all fact and reason, and the mainstream media has seen fit to lend that rhetoric credence. See, for example, Senator Durbin's absurd comparison of Guantanamo Bay's jailkeepers to Nazis or Amnesty International's fraudulent claim that Gitmo is the "gulag of our time." Why has it been so hard to raise the interest of anybody other than activists and partisans?.........
..........We Americans are quite used to being accused of human rights violations by every dirtbag -- and every apologist for dirtbags -- on the planet. Activist American leftists and their anti-American supporters abroad have been accusing America of atrocities at least since the mid-sixties. According to the left, the United States and its soldiers or agents were criminals by virtue of our dealings in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Chile, Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Israel, Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Angola, Somalia and Ethiopia (I'm sure that I've forgotten a few). We know that wherever we go, whatever we do, we will be committing human rights violations -- at least according to international NGOs, the BBC, most European media, most American professors, most activists in the Democratic party, and most members of the United Nations. Fine. We understand that according to their decadent sense of right and wrong we're the most evil country on Earth. We know that we cannot change thinking of this sort and we've learned to live with it. We come to our own conclusions about right and wrong without reference to what other people think. This may be extremely impractical of us insofar as it makes it very difficult to win this war, but it describes our emotional state and it explains why many Americans cannot be motivated to give a damn by any amount of hysterical rhetoric on the floor of the Senate or in halls of the United Nations.
I will start caring what the world's chattering classes think when they hold non-Americans -- Africans, Arabs, and Chinese in particular -- to the same standards. Until they do, I am forced to conclude that these critics of America are either racist to the core -- they simply expect less of Africans, Arabs and Asians -- or politically anti-American. There is no third explanation. Until then, therefore, I will support our military, knowing full well that the world has never seen a serious war without some violations of law, and that this war is almost certainly the cleanest counterinsurgency since the invention of counterinsurgency."
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