I can’t shake my dread at the horrifying story of Haditha. I agree with Peter Beinart and Andrew Sullivan that our seeking out and punishing the perpetrators—according to the rule of law—is what distinguishes us from our enemies.
In today’s New York Times, John F. Burns, in a story called “Getting Used to War as Hell,” is very circumspect about drawing easy conclusions. More important, he gives vital context to the story and to the truth that will emerge, however stark:
Reporters who have spent time embedded with the Marines return, almost invariably, with a strong sense of the comradeship that binds the units and an admiration for the discipline and fitness drilled into the fighting men, and, not least, for the lengths the corps is prepared to go to get reporters to the battlefront and to protect them while they’re there.
But the harsh Marine battle tactics make an impact, too. Reporters’ experiences with the Marines, even more than with the Army, show they resort quickly to using heavy artillery or laser-guided bombs when rooting out insurgents who have taken refuge among civilians, with inevitable results.
Among the Marines, there is a tendency, an eagerness even, to see themselves as the stepchild of the American military effort, sent into much of the hardest fighting, undermanned for the task, equipped with Vietnam-era helicopters and amphibious armored vehicles that make lumbering targets in the desert — then criticized by Army commanders, sometimes severely, for a lack of proportionality in the way they fight.
More heartbreaking still are some words written to Frank Schaeffer by his son, who served in Iraq:
“Date: 9/25/03 8:27:01 PM Dear Mom and Dad: I have learned that the right thing and the necessary thing are not synonymous, rarely are they even in the same ballpark. It’s very depressing to see the results of some necessary actions, it’s never pure, and there is no purity here . . .
“People ignore what they cannot see. They just don’t want to know. The truth is too ugly and vicious to comprehend . . .
“In a natural state a human will kill, and kill not always for necessity, but for convenience as well. The only way that I know I am still me is that I hate that fact; I hate it more than anything I have ever known.”
This is a hard truth. It adds many shades of gray, and implies a deeper truth: that even a just war carries unbearably heavy moral penalties.
And it reminds me of something Golda Meir said in 1969:
When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.
She also once said:
There’s no difference between killing and making decisions by which you send others to kill. It’s exactly the same thing. And maybe it’s worse.
So says pollster Stan Greenberg, who “conducted [surveys of European "opinion elites"] for the Israel Project, a US-based non-profit organization devoted to educating the press and the public about Israel.”
Greenberg told The Jerusalem Post that the shifts in attitudes reflected in the surveys were so dramatic that he “redid” some of the polls to ensure there had been no error.
He singled out France as the country where attitudes had changed most dramatically. Three years ago, 60 percent of French respondents said they took a side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and of that 60%, four out of five backed the Palestinians. Today, by contrast, 60% of French respondents did not take a side in the conflict, and support for the Palestinians had dropped by half among those who did express a preference.
Greenberg speculates that trouble from the Muslims at home in their midst in France is the reason for this dramatic shift in attitudes.
Today, by contrast, the Europeans “are focused on fundamentalist Islam and its impact on them,” he said. The Europeans were now asking themselves “who is the moderate in this conflict, and who is the extremist? And suddenly it is the Palestinians who may be the extremists, or who are allied with extremists who threaten Europe’s own society.”
An increasing proportion of Europeans are concluding that “maybe the Palestinians are not the colonialist victims” after all.
Is this a leading indicator of a new narrative for the Middle East? I would hesitate many times before saying that. For one thing, it’s not as if anyone is rushing to claim that the Israelis are the good guys (which would be yet another cartoon version of the conflict anyway). We don’t know which “opinion elites” Greenberg surveyed. Also, there’s a huge difference between a shift in people’s private views and their actions or, as in the case of “opinion elites,” their words.
This is not a trivial point, as indicated by Kevin Drum, whom I quoted the other day as acknowledging that he is reluctant to criticize the world’s bad guys, because it would serve the “illiberal” Bush. Contrast Drum’s attitude—which is widely shared on the “left,” if the left side of the blogosphere is any indication—with that of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who insists on naming names, as I wrote here.)
Leading indicators picked up by pollsters and other observers have a way of being buried by “opinion elites” when those elites have no new narrative framework to work from. And that is the issue: The opinion elites of the West (MSM, TV scholars, talking heads, pundits, and other “experts”) are working from old narratives, which have gone unexamined (due to laziness, narcissism, cocooning, the echo chamber, denial, post-materialist guilt, or what have you) for more than thirty years.
As Oliver Kamm says in Anti-Totalitarianism, which I wrote about here:
Least surprising in any survey of opinion on the causes of terrorism is the resistance of the ostensibly Marxist Left to re-examining its presumptions about the sources of oppression in the modern world.
(p. 71)
Wretchard wrote recently:
Radical Marxist thought derives protection from its status as a defeated mode of political action. The Cold War was fought against armed Marxism on every continent and clime for half a century. But when the Cold War was over, or in places where Radical Marxists did not actually take up arms they were allowed to keep their narratives and tolerated, as the Muslim Ottoman Empire once countenanced Jews and Christians for as long as they posed no threat. No physical threat. But although Marxism was defeated by the largely economic process of Globalization it flourished — even dominated — in the cultural institutions of the West at a time when Islamism was triumphing over secularism in the Middle East. From the Marxist perspective at least, the Cold War ended not in defeat, but in a negotiated armistice; with surrender on the economic front offset by a capitulation to it by the West on cultural matters.
Oh, that liberal bias.
The “opinion elites,” who (mostly unaware of this) are heavily influenced by the detritus of the Marxist critique, haven’t yet caught up with the new facts on the ground, which shifts beneath our feet every day. I don’t blame them. Like Francis Fukuyama we all wanted to believe that the end of the Cold War was the end of history.
It wasn’t. But we’re all (from Drum to Hirsi Ali, and everyone in between) in the same boat in these choppy waters. We all need to get on the same side against the millenarian ideology and fanatics who want to do us in. We need to put them on the wrong side of history. If we can’t even do it rhetorically, how will we manage it in actuality?
