World Trade Center to Abu Ghraib

World Trade Center to Abu Ghraib

How did we go from the heroism, unity, and sense of purpose that marked 9/11, to the degradation, shame, and cruelty of Abu Ghraib? Do you remember the spirit of that time, less than three years ago? We told ourselves that we had to see our enemies clearly, work with our friends, especially our friends in the Middle East, and draw hope from those who were equally determined to destroy Al Qaeda. We knew that many Muslims shared our determination to put this organization out of business. And we knew that we needed their help.

Now let me ask you: do you think that man lying on the floor is an enemy of ours? I'll tell you something: I don't know who he is. I'll bet virtually no American in the whole prison knew who he was. He was an Arab and they were going to have some fun with him. You know that even if he were a member of Al Qaeda, we would have been wrong to treat him that way. Our enemies may not follow the rules of war, but we should.

Let's go back to the original question: How did we go from the World Trade Center on September 11 to Lyndie England holding a beaten, naked man on a leash? Will anyone admit that when you engage in a war that's wrong you can expect that kind of thing to happen? You have to see the connection between an unjust war and the way we have treated people who aren't even our enemies.

For a longer answer to the question above, see Ugly War at the TheLastJeffersonian.com. The essay explains why America should leave Iraq. America should leave Iraq because it should not have gone there in the first place. To defeat your enemies, you have to go where your enemies are.

Lincoln said that we had to suffer through the Civil War as punishment for the sin of slavery. What will our punishment be for attacking Iraq? We have already heard our enemies, the ones who planned 9/11, call us war criminals, and know they are telling the truth. We have ceded the moral high ground to some of the worst people who have ever lived, people who are clearly criminals themselves. That's an accomplishment.

When I lived through the Reagan years, I had an instinct, a feeling in my heart, that this was it, this was the apogee, this was like the time that Julius Caesar ruled Rome. Caesar's rule actually came pretty early in the history of Roman civilization, and Rome still had quite a few good rulers to come, including Marcus Aurelius. But after Caesar's friends betrayed him and killed him, things unraveled, and historians could truthfully say that Rome never shone as brightly after that astonishing act of selfishness on the steps of the Senate.

America, Reagan's shining city on a hill, will never again shine as brightly as it did during those eight brief years. I certainly didn't want my instinct to be proven correct. When Reagan said that America's best years were still to come, I agreed with the sentiment, and I wanted it to be true. I certainly liked his rhetoric, and I was not among those who charged him with false optimism. I wanted him to bolster American confidence, and Americans had lots to be hopeful about, lots to be proud of. Reagan did the right thing, as a leader, to encourage the people who followed him. We would praise a military leader for doing so, and we should praise Reagan as a political leader for doing the same.

Yet Reagan's refrain that our best years were ahead of us proved wrong. Events proved the instinct correct after all. I had no idea in the 1980s how the story might turn out. The 1990s brought exactly the kind of prosperity that Reagan predicted: technology driven and based on innovation, it was a prosperity that rewarded free enterprise and entrepreneurship. Not only that, the Soviet Union collapsed, just as Reagan said it would. As a judge of human events and a seer of human aspirations, Reagan built an outstanding record of accurate prophecy.

As far as I could tell, no one in the 1980s thought about the significance of the Reagan years this way. I didn't see any essays from the people who liked Reagan about how America's best years were behind her. The left had long nurtured a reputation for speaking pessimistically about America's future. The conservatives who liked Reagan didn't seem to have any reason to doubt what Reagan himself said about our shining prospects.

Well, no one predicted 9/11, that's for sure. It was easy to predict that our enemies would strike us at home someday, but that particular attack took everyone off guard. What a turning point that unexpected event turned out to be. We could have shrugged it off, or we could have gone nuts. If we had shrugged it off, Reagan would have been right: we would have been the world's shining city on a hill for many more generations. If we went nuts, as we did, we would provoke the outcome that we are already coming to see: despised, defeated, dejected and discouraged, we command no admiration or respect anywhere, least of all in the places where we need it the most.

Let me elaborate a little. How could we have wanted to shrug off something like 9/11? One commentator, on public radio a few weeks after 9/11, told the story of a Roman legion that lost about 600 men a minute during a terrible battle against a powerful enemy. He said that the Romans just shrugged it off. They went ahead and coldly destroyed their opponent. That's how they maintained their power. The commentator did not say that we should forget the people who died on 9/11, or that we should not honor them. He just wanted to say that we should not give in to hand-wringing, anger, soul-searching, and the like. We should just find our enemies, destroy them, and be done with it. Be methodical and ruthless. It's one of the things you have to do to maintain order and protect your citizens.

Well, we didn't search out our enemies, and our leaders certainly didn't search their souls. We went totally nuts, like a blinded boxer who, out of pain and frustration, swings wildly and hits anyone who might be standing by. Bush's defense of his action against Iraq sounds more strained and unconvincing each time he delivers it. If you don't find Bush's defense persuasive, the only explanation for our attack is the blind boxer gone nuts. Or perhaps not so blind. We found a victim we could defeat, and one where we had a score to settle to boot. We went after a non-enemy that was available rather than the real enemy who got away.

So now we're going to spend the next four hundred years looking back, wondering how we could have made such a serious mistake in 2003. It's not going to seem so bad here in the United States. We'll still have our prosperity, some of our freedoms, our ideals and disconnected memories. We'll still have a few friends like Britain and Australia, and others who will tolerate us out of self-interest or because they have no choice. But I tell you, we won't ever command the respect that we had around the world when Eastern Europe expressed its gratitude to us for delivering them from the Soviet Union. We won't ever know the warmth and the genuine sorrow that flowed toward us in the days and weeks after 9/11. We'll be a byword and an object of contempt through most of the world now, because we couldn't see clearly what we had to do after the twin towers fell. We'll become irrelevant, and then defeated, because we couldn't shrug it off.

Lincoln said that America's example gives "hope to mankind, future for all time." What a loss to the world that we couldn't live up to Lincoln's ideal in a time of trial. Reagan always asked, what will people one hundred years from now say about us, when they look to the decisions we made about life and death, war and peace, freedom and slavery? Will they thank us for making the right decisions, for protecting what we had and passing it down? Until the war in Iraq, we had a good reputation. A good reputation is worth protecting: it takes a long time to build, only a short time to ruin it. That's why good people are so careful not to make a mistake that destroys something they've worked hard to create. We used to have a good reputation with freedom loving people, and we gave hope to everyone who aspired to a free life. Now people around the world, though they won't admit it, would like to put a leash on us.