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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lorne who wrote (22683)	5/14/2004 10:22:44 PM
From: lorne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

Don't follow a script written by the terrorists Thursday, May 13, 2004 - Collin Levey / Times editorial columnist seattletimes.nwsource.com When it seemed this week that the pictures from Abu Ghraib couldn't get any worse, the beheading of a 26-year-old American from Philadelphia put things in perspective. Nick Berg was killed to exploit a news cycle. Let's be clear: The trouble at Abu Ghraib has become a legitimate bonfire because we let ourselves down and tarnished the principles we are trying to export to suffering corners of the world. But we can stop imagining that any such delicate sensibility ought to be applied to the Arab street, or to homicidal militants with chef's knives and video cameras. The hooded men who sawed Berg's neck for the cameras didn't do it because they were shocked or outraged by our treatment of prisoners. (Does anyone take this idea seriously?) They executed him because we were shocked and outraged and because they hoped that, wallowing in our own scandal, we would blame ourselves for his death. Those recriminations, they figured, would weaken us further. And just to make sure, they even read a slavering statement making the murder's connection with Abu Ghraib explicit. Hey, it worked with Spain, didn't it? There, following the deadly train bombing in Madrid, more than a few citizens took the bait the terrorists intended: that the country had been a target because of its participation in Iraq. Staging their slaughter a few days before the elections, the terrorists correctly predicted it would create a miniwave of self doubt sufficient to elect a government more to al-Qaida's liking. Then, as now, the murders weren't just about retribution but about using us against ourselves. And lo, within hours of the news of the beheading on Tuesday, analysts were all over television lapping up the suggestion that this was the first fallout from making prisoners wear underwear on their heads. The networks may pat themselves on the back for following the script. No one else should. Nick Berg, let's remember, had been missing since April 9. Operating under the assumption that he didn't spend several weeks wandering Iraq unmolested, his kidnapping occurred well before the depravity of Abu Ghraib came to light. His killing also was a direct replay of Daniel Pearl's, which took place long before the U.S. invaded Iraq. This doesn't mean that the Iraqis who saw us as liberators weren't offended by the treatment of the prisoners in Abu Ghraib. But it's no accident that our prisoner abuses have been met with a deafening silence by the leaders in the Middle East. As was laid out on CBS's "60 Minutes" on Sunday, the Saudis aren't above torturing innocent Westerners to find scapegoats for the Islamic terrorism in their midst. Libya is on the verge of executing a group of foreign doctors and nurses for failures of the Libyan health-care system. For our part, what's troubling Americans now is partly a sense of loss of purpose. When the original case for war — Saddam Hussein's danger to the broader world — was diluted by the absence of weapons stockpiles, we focused on liberation. It's in this context that the recent troubles have chafed. Reports that Iraqi polls find large numbers angry with the occupation, or scenes of rioting militants burning American soldiers and vehicles, have created a bout of navel-gazing. What if the Iraqis don't like us after all? It bears repeating that winning Iraqi hearts and minds was never a necessary precondition to accomplishing our real goal of stability in the region. Iraqis just needed to be convinced that we were strong enough to prevail and it would behoove them to go along. Intelligent Iraqis know that if we fail, that's when their real troubles begin. Women and children were among the thousand or so who demonstrated publicly in Najaf this week, demanding that Muqtada al-Sadr's insurgents leave the city and stop using it as a base to attack Americans. Meanwhile, in Washington, when Sen. Jim Inhofe dared to suggest that the prisoner abuses needed to be kept in some perspective, his words were met with staged outrage. Sen. John McCain showily marched out while he was speaking and others quickly denounced his comments as unhelpful. In fact, they were just unnecessary. The nature of our culture thrives on seamy secrets: We revel in our own warts. We spend millions on tabloids and breaking news and tell-all autobiographies. But there is also a steadfastness that the butchers underestimate. In one of the worst weeks of the war thus far, public opinion polls are telling a more subtle story. Despite revulsion at the Abu Ghraib photos, over 60 percent rejected the suggestion that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should resign. Partly because most Americans don't feed as frenetically at the 24-hour news channels the way Beltway pundits do, the average voter still has possession of his senses. Americans know that even Abu Ghraib, as offensive as the scandal is, doesn't compare to the fate of two nations, ours and the Iraqis'. Berg's murder — and what it tells us about our enemy — reminds us how important it is that we win.