American soldiers, American civilians, and other innocent people are going to die because Pres. Barack Obama wants to release photographs of prisoner abuse. Note: I said, "wants to release" — not "has to release," or "is being forced to release," or "will comply with court orders by releasing." The photos, quite likely thousands of them, will be released because the president wants them released. Any other description of the situation is a dodge.
If President Obama wanted to refrain from releasing these photos in order to protect the military forces he commands or promote the security of Americans — his two highest obligations as president — he could do so by simply issuing an executive order. The applicable statute expressly allows for it, just as it provides for Congress — now in the firm control of the president and his party — to withhold the photos from disclosure. Instead, Obama and congressional Democrats are choosing to release the photos.
They are making that choice fully aware that it will cost lives. It is a sedulous Democrat talking-point, repeated most recently by Carl Levin, the Senate Armed Services chairman and a key Obama ally, that the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib inspired new terrorist recruits, caused American combat casualties, and made the United States more vulnerable to terrorist attack. This has long been Obama's own position. It is a charge he made throughout the 2008 campaign, and it is one he repeated just a month ago in his Strasbourg speech: "When we saw what happened in Abu Ghraib, that wasn't good for our security — that was a recruitment tool for terrorism. Humiliating people is never a good strategy to battle terrorism."
It was not by reading news reports about prisoner abuse that "we saw what happened at Abu Ghraib." It was by viewing the graphic photos: the images broadcast incessantly throughout the world, used simultaneously by al-Qaeda and by the anti-war Left to condemn the United States military, the United States government, and the American people themselves for the aberrational depravity of an unrepresentative handful of rogue prison guards. Obama has always been very much a part of the anti-war Left. That's why he can make the risible assertion that "humiliating people" was anyone's "strategy to battle terrorism." That is why he said at a CNN campaign forum last June that "Abu Ghraib is something that all of us should be ashamed for, even if you were supportive of a war."
Obama doesn't have the political nerve to end the war. But he is slowly (or, as he'd no doubt put it, pragmatically) strangling the war effort. A critical part of the antiwar project is to make Americans feel ashamed of defending ourselves, inducing us to accept the European view that actions taken in our defense — even those that have protected us from additional jihadist strikes — tarnish our image, stir our enemies, and put us in grave danger. Better to go back to seeing terrorism as a law-enforcement concern, this theory holds, and accept the occasional terrorist strike as a cost of managing, rather than fighting, this scourge. What we lose in dead Americans, the argument goes, will be more than compensated for in increased international prestige — if not for the United States, at least for Barack Obama. Discrediting the war effort itself is what the release of these photos is about.
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Even at the cost of American lives.
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