All-righty, Gentle Readers, I suspect that not a single one of you woke up this morning thinking ‘but what does Vardibidian think of the whole Newsweek brouhaha?’ I hope not, anyway. Still, a bloggists rant should exceed his grasp of the facts, else what’s the internet for? And, you know, if you want actual informed commentary, there’s CJR Daily.
Newsweek should not have printed the note. Heck, probably a tenth of what they print isn’t really well-sourced. Journalism ain’t perfect, and the reliance on anonymice would be outrageous, if it weren’t so common to defeat outrage. As it is, this piece wasn’t any worse than a fair number of stories I read in the Post the other day. My guess is that Newsweek passed the note because nothing in it was particularly surprising. Everyone who had been following the story at all (which did not include Your Humble Blogger, who has a weak stomach) knew that there had been similar allegations in the past. Newsweek’s scoop, such as it was, involved a government report that they said would confirm those allegations; in fact, the report neither confirms nor denies them. Newsweek never did (nor claimed to do) any research into the actual allegations themselves. They did a story about the report, and they got the story about the report wrong.
Then there were riots. It does seem as if the people whipping up the riots used the Newsweek story to inflame opinion; I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t have found some other news to inflame opinion if Newsweek had pulled the story, or had pulled the entire issue, or had closed down operations a month ago. Under those circumstances, it’s hard blame Newsweek specifically for the riots. I doubt there was anybody there who even thought that desecration of a holy text would be more inflammatory than allegations of, oh, say, rape or murder.
On the other hand, Anti-American riots were potentially predictable, in part because they had already started before Newsweek published its story. It was predictable that a large number of people living in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Syria, Lebanon and, yes, Iraq would believe the allegation simply because that’s the kind of behaviour they expect from American prisons. That’s the scandal. If America was the America I believe in, such allegations would either have been laughed at or considered the aberrant action of crazy rogues. Instead they are a symbol of our belief system and our nation. Rioters believed the allegations because, frankly, it’s easier to believe interrogaters did throw pages from the Koran into a toilet than to believe that it never happened. It’s easier for me to believe it, and the Lord knows it must be easier for some fellah on a rubble-lined street in some Afghan town to believe it. They’re rioting, and will riot again, because it’s easy to believe the US pisses on the Koran, not because it was confirmed in some government report.
And let me add—even if it didn’t happen, even if all the allegations of abuse are overplayed, even if it really was no worse than a fraternity hazing (and no, that is not the case, but I’m indulging in a rhetorical device, here), even if our forces adhered to the standards they publicly espouse and even if the actual conduct of our forces in those prisons would make us proud, if we only knew the truth ... even if all the vile filth that we read about is a frame hung on our noble men and women by enemies of the homeland, even if Saddam bin-Laden himself hacked into Newsweek’s computers to plant malicious falsehoods, the fact still remains that the populace is convinced that the US hates Islam and its followers. As long as that is true, we can’t rebuild Afghanistan (much less Iraq), and we won’t have peace. Newsweek is not to blame for that.
Our Recent President has said that he thought the major failure of his presidency was the failure to convince what he called “the Moslem world” of what we had done and could do for it. He was, I think, specifically referring to actions in the former Yugoslavia and in sub-Saharan Africa, but perhaps also he was thinking that his administration’s involvement in Arab-Israeli negotiations could be sold that way. He was convinced that he had done the right things, but that he had failed to sell the right things. I don’t know if I agree, but in my cynical way, the lesson I draw is that it is the selling that’s important. Now, one good way to sell is to have a good product; had we built a paradise in Iraq, it would have been easy to sell. Whether or no, I think we can say that whatever the product we have produced actually looks like, Our Only President has totally failed to sell it. And what Newsweek’s failure does, as far as I’m concerned, is highlight that failure, which is far more important, and has killed far more people.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.