HEY ANDREW SULLIVAN: WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT WHAT YOU THINK?

My reactions to some passages from Andrew Sullivan's condescending "I'm really close to saying the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a mistake" column. As if we ought to stand or fall on Andrew Sullivan's bourgeois convictions...those bourgeois convictions are in italics below.

it has destroyed this narrative. It has turned the image of this war into the war that the America-hating left always said it was: a brutal, imperialist, racist occupation, designed to humiliate another culture.

I don't really care what the "America-hating left" allegedly said. I'm on the America-loving left, deeply unsatisfied with the way both major parties have misrepresented and misappropriated what I love about America, and the Iraq fiasco is simply one manifestation of said misappropriation. The ingenuity of this great nation could have been deployed to find far more creative, ethical, and effective solutions to conflicts and tyrants, but the blind-spots created by vast inequalities and wealth and power preclude that ingenuity. We should not be surprised at the micro-instantiations of macro-level uncreative brutality.

Shock has now led - and should lead - to anger. And those of us who support the war should, in many ways, be angrier than those who opposed it...

An interesting, subtle slight against the moral sincerity of those who opposed the war. Essentially, he is saying that war opponents ought to be pleased that these things are happening. Speaking for myself, I deplore the fact that mistreatment occurred, but celebrate the fact that it was revealed to the outside world. And of course Sullivan and other liberal supporters of the war ought to be angry, but that anger is constructive only if it functions in the same way as our anger when we were seven or eight years old and realized our parents had been lying to us about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

To my mind, these awful recent revelations - and they may get far worse - make it even more essential that we bring democratic government to Iraq, and don't cut and run. Noam Chomsky is wrong. Abu Ghraib is not the real meaning of America.

First of all, what a terribly predictable and uncreative conclusion--but at the same time, what a brilliant "heads I win, tails you lose" rhetorical strategy.

I am not sure if by "the real meaning of America" the author means the ideal meaning of America, but the following data at least shows that the violation of that "real meaning" is deeply embedded in the American corrections system:

"Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern, according to corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates.

"In Pennsylvania and some other states, inmates are routinely stripped in front of other inmates before being moved to a new prison or a new unit within their prison. In Arizona, male inmates at the Maricopa County jail in Phoenix are made to wear women's pink underwear as a form of humiliation."

...

"The corrections experts say that some of the worst abuses have occurred in Texas, whose prisons were under a federal consent decree during much of the time President Bush was governor because of crowding and violence by guards against inmates. Judge William Wayne Justice of Federal District Court imposed the decree after finding that guards were
allowing inmate gang leaders to buy and sell other inmates as slaves for sex."

[full: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/08/national/08PRIS.html?hp]

Okay, these anecdotes aren't "America" in some idealistic sense either, but many Americans don't care that these things happen, just as many of those who've posted on various message boards say that the offenders in Abu Ghraib deserve medals, since the Iraqis aren't human anyway.

I'll say something else: America has multiple, often contradictory meanings. I am uncomfortable giving Chomsky, Parenti and others unfettered license to assign America a unitary meaning in exploitation and colonialism, but Sullivan and other liberals (including my friend Russell Arben Fox) often write with the unspoken assumption that America was not also a process of colonialism, that we did not displace its previous residents using tactics that the Nazis later emulated, ignoring the argument eloquently made by M. Annette James that, in a sense, the foundational stone (I would amend only to say ONE foundational stone) upon which American arrogance rests is, in fact, genocide against indigenous people; or the argument less eloquently (but more forcefully) made by Ward Churchill that, even among "progressives" and do-gooders, there is a universal tendency to ignore the historical fact that the resources with which we promote our visions of the good are resources we stole from other people.

Rush Limbaugh quoted some mid-level American bureaucrat in Iraq, who had in turn quoted a mid-level Iraqi bureaucrat, who allegedly said "educated" Iraqis didn't care what happened at Abu Gharaib, that they were "non-plussed" about the whole thing. Riiiiiight. Here's what Riverbend has to say about it:

People are seething with anger- the pictures of Abu Ghraib and the Brits in Basrah are everywhere. Every newspaper you pick up in Baghdad has pictures of some American or British atrocity or another. It's like a nightmare that has come to life.

Everyone knew this was happening in Abu Ghraib and other places… seeing the pictures simply made it all more real and tangible somehow. American and British politicians have the audacity to come on television with words like, "True the people in Abu Ghraib are criminals, but…" Everyone here in Iraq knows that there are thousands of innocent people detained. Some were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, while others were detained 'under suspicion'. In the New Iraq, it's "guilty until proven innocent by some miracle of God".

People are so angry. There’s no way to explain the reactions- even pro-occupation Iraqis find themselves silenced by this latest horror. I can’t explain how people feel- or even how I personally feel. Somehow, pictures of dead Iraqis are easier to bear than this grotesque show of American military technique. People would rather be dead than sexually abused and degraded by the animals running Abu Ghraib prison.

Last thought: What happened at Abu Gharaib is obscene, but bourgeois liberals who can handle the macro-violence of war but not the micro-violence of prison brutality are just plain disgusting. They make me want to cry into my soft little hanky. They make me want to vomit up my martinis.