May 19, 2004, 9:01 a.m.
Why We Fight
A few of us have been inhumane. They are
inhuman.
By William J. Bennett
EDITOR'S NOTE:
The following remarks were delivered by William J. Bennett to the
Claremont Institute
President's Club on May 14, 2004, in Palm Springs, California.*
Last
month, given all of the attacks on our soldiers, and the conflicts in
Fallujah and Najaf, I was reminded of T.S. Eliot, who wrote, "April is the
cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land; mixing memory and
desire; stirring dull roots with spring rain."
Now, with the reports and images we are seeing from
Abu Ghraib, the hearings in the House and Senate, and the slaughter of
Nicholas Berg of Philadelphia, I'm not sure what to say about this month
it contends with April, to say the least. Our emotions are stirred, our
consciences are challenged. Nonetheless, our mission must remain clear;
our armed forces must remain resolute, and we must gird ourselves for what
lies ahead. Given all we have seen and read over the past few months, I
think what Churchill said is applicable today: "This is not the end. It is
not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the
beginning." Now is the time to take our gloves off. Now is the time to
show our hand. Now is the time to unleash our terrible, swift sword a
sword we may have kept sheathed for too long.
Let me start with the images of Abu Ghraib. We were
all rightly disgusted and dejected by what we saw there. Several of our
soldiers engaged in ugly, deplorable, disgusting, and inhumane acts. Let's
remember those adjectives. We need to get our language right. Emerson
said, "The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language."
What happened at Abu Ghraib was not a matter of poor training or bad
supervision. These were humans acting inhumanely. When I hear that they
were not properly trained or supervised, I wonder if those who say that
have lost their common sense as well.
What kind of training does someone need to know that
it is wrong to abuse other human beings like that, mugging for a camera,
knowing such images will travel somewhere if not everywhere? This was
not a matter of poor military training any more than it was a matter of
poor military judgment. This was a matter of poor human training and poor
human judgment. We don't need to read the Geneva Conventions or the Code
of Military Justice to know this. This was basic stuff. You can find it in
the Bible; you can find it in Aristotle. If you need the armed forces to
be trained in decency, you've waited too long. This was not the fault of
our armed forces any more than it was the fault of Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld or President George W. Bush.
Let's remember the characters here, and let's
remember how it shows the character of America. Yes, some American
soldiers did this ugly stuff in Abu Ghraib. But it was reported and
stopped by other American soldiers. We have the image of Lynndie England
(the cultural descendant of Tonya Harding), pointing to naked men, holding
another man by a leash. We do not need to see her again. We've forgotten
perhaps because it wasn't much reported the name of Army Specialist
Joseph M. Darby. But as Anne Applebaum of the Washington Post wrote
last week, both soldiers Darby and England had choices. England had
the choice to engage in inhumane activity, and Joseph Darby had the choice
to do nothing about it. Here, however, is what Darby chose: "He chose to
place an anonymous note under the door of a superior describing the abuse.
Later he chose to make a sworn statement, setting off the investigation."
We know little of England, save that she grew up
fairly poor and in a trailer park. As if that general report explains
anything. It doesn't. Here's what we know, now, of Specialist Joe Darby:
"Darby lived in a coal town, in a household headed by a disabled
stepfather. To make ends meet, he worked the night shift at Wendy's." Bad
actions, wrong actions, even evil actions, have nothing to do with
economics, poverty, wealth, or any other artificial construct any more
than good actions do. They have to do with moral fiber. Those who attacked
us on 9/11, as much as those who planned and trained them, were upper- and
middle-class Arabs. Bin Laden is wealthier than any of us can hope to be.
Mohammed Atta drove a Mercedes. Al-Zawahiri is a physician from an
upper-class family. Let's hear no more of root causes; let's speak,
instead, of right and wrong and good and evil. What Lynndie England did is
not anywhere near on par with what our attackers did, but economic
circumstance is the cause of neither of their actions. And as for shame,
the bag should be on Lynndie England's head, not the prisoners'. She is
the one who should be hiding, or should have been hiding, from the camera
not mugging for it.
There are questions that the press needs to answer
for too.
To paraphrase
Jonah Goldberg: Why is it that when shocking images might stir
Americans to favor war like the beheading of an American citizen the
journalists show great restraint? When those images have the opposite
effect, why do journalists let them fly?
Let me put this in context: The very day that the
Muntada al-Ansar website distributed the images of the slaughter of Nick
Berg, almost every media outlet went on record to say they would not show
that slaughter. CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and NBC all said this, according to
AP Television writer David Bauder. Fox News, I gather, did not make a
knee-jerk decision; they did not go on immediate record with the AP.
Perhaps they were contemplating the morality of it all.
We've been here before. Not only was there very
little shown of the burning and beating and hanging of the contract
workers in Fallujah at the end of March; you cannot even get those images
now. There were immediate decisions not to show footage of 9/11 either.
How many people in this room remember those who were in the Twin Towers
and jumped out of them, to their certain death, thinking, evidently, that
jumping from 80 stories and above was a better option than what they were
going through? How many people know how many jumpers there were? NBC
showed one man jumping, then stopped saying it was a mistake. There were
an estimated 200 people who jumped to their deaths, for a few more seconds
of life, a few more seconds of relief, as they went to their eternal
resting places, taking their last ten seconds of life in their own hands,
using drapes and tablecloths as parachutes parachutes that the force of
their fall ripped from their hands.
Why do we not see the plastic shredders that humans
were placed in under Saddam Hussein, sometimes head first, sometimes feet
first? Why do we not see Hussein's torture chambers, which were operated
as a matter of policy, and see instead only our abuse, which was an
aberration? Why do we not see the mass graves of al-Hilla? Why do we only
see our abuse and not their terror? And why do you almost exclusively have
to read Victor Davis Hanson and Jeff Jacoby to learn about the successes
in Iraq? Why as Christopher Hitchens has said do you have to go to
Iraq yourself to see what is actually being done by our soldiers, what is
being done to help, repair, fix, make better, that one-time cradle of
civilization that Hussein turned into a deathbed and hellhole?
Yes, it is time, indeed even in the cruelty of April
and May, to show that we are "breeding lilacs out of the dead land;
stirring dull roots with spring rain."
Professor Hanson has done a wonderful job of
explaining many of our great successes in this war. If I may paraphrase
him: Osama bin Laden is either dead or on the run; and when terrorists are
on the run, they cannot easily plan attacks. We have killed or captured
two-thirds of the al Qaeda leadership and, for the first time in over a
decade, marginalized the modern world's leading terrorist, Yasser Arafat.
It was Arafat who taught the world the use of hijacking airliners for
political purposes. During the Clinton administration it was he who
visited the White House more than any other foreign leader. Arafat has not
been offered one meeting, handshake, or embrace by President Bush. Libya
has issued an international surrender. Saddam Hussein is in prison. The
list goes on and on.
And as Jeff Jacoby has written about our successes in
Iraq: "Unemployment has been cut in half. Wages are climbing. The
devastated southern marshlands are being restored. More Iraqis own cars
and telephones than before Saddam was ousted. Some 2,500 schools have been
rehabbed by the U.S.-headed coalition. Spending on health care has soared
thirty-fold, and millions of Iraqi children have been vaccinated. Iraqi
athletes, no longer terrorized by Saddam's sadistic son Uday, are training
for the summer Olympics in Greece. Many who fled Iraq under Hussein, are
fleeing back especially from Iran. The exodus of refugees that was
predicted on the eve of our liberation had it exactly backward: People are
fleeing into Iraq." That list goes on and on, too.
It is this set of lists, these reasons and not the
abuse of a handful at Abu Ghraib that caused Abu Zarqawi and his band of
thugs to slaughter Nick Berg. They know what America is doing, and they
know that if America wins this effort, they and their fascism will be
finished. They targeted Nick Berg because he was an American and
possibly also because he was a Jew; and they would have killed him whether
the Abu Ghraib story was published or not. How do I know? I know because
the Abu Ghraib story was not disseminated when these barbarians burned,
stomped, and hung our contractors in Fallujah. I know because the Abu
Ghraib incidents hadn't even happened when Wall Street Journal
reporter Danny Pearl suffered exactly the same fate as Nick Berg in
February of 2002. And, I know because Abu Ghraib was in the hands of
Saddam Hussein on 9/11, when bin Laden and his allies killed, murdered,
slaughtered 3,000 of us. We encourage their wrath by our existence, not by
our actions.
One must judge this democracy ours as one must
judge any country democracy or not: in its totality, and in its mean.
Not in its extreme, and not in its aberration. Although we should be proud
of how we are treating our aberrant soldiers, with accountability and due
process and punishment, I agree with what the late Pat Moynihan said. He
asked then, and we ask now: "Am I ashamed to speak on behalf of a less
than perfect country? Find me a better one. Do I suppose there are
societies which are free of sin? No, I don't. Do I think ours is, on
balance, incomparably the most hopeful set of human relations the world
has? Yes, I do. Have we done obscene things? Yes, we have. How did our
people learn about them? They learned about them on television and in the
newspapers." And we put our criminals whether in uniform or not on
trial.
Why we fight is, indeed, as important as how we
fight. So how have we fought? We need some context and perspective.
Our enemy attacked us on 9/11 in disguise, not in
uniform, not in marked warplanes from an enemy country. Rather, unlike
Pearl Harbor, our enemies trained abroad, moved here, lived here under the
guise of legality, and used civilian aircraft and civilian tactics to kill
as many innocents as possible.
Also, unlike Pearl Harbor, their targets were not
military but civilian.
And, unlike Pearl Harbor, it appears much of the
money used to finance our enemies came from money raised in the U.S. and
from money raised in countries that are purported allies of the U.S. How
did we respond?
Yes, there was our abuse at Abu Ghraib. But as John
Stuart Mill wrote, "There is no difficulty in proving any ethical standard
whatever to work ill, if we suppose universal idiocy to be conjoined with
it." Thankfully, the idiocy was that of a handful, and not universal.
But, we have not as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and
the great liberal Earl Warren, did established internment camps for over
100,000 U.S. citizens whose only crime was looking like people we were at
war with in another country.
We have not engaged in racial profiling. We have
given trials to those who claim abuses of our post-9/11 system. And we
have even released prisoners from Guantαnamo to our detriment, as we now
learn that four of those we've released have rejoined al Qaeda in
Afghanistan, where, we also note, violence is now again on the rise. This
administration's record on civil liberties, on profiling, on respect for
minorities, is receiving far too little attention. Why, for example, are
we never reminded and how many of you are learning for the first time
here that the head of the U.S. Central Command, the person who now holds
the position previously held by Norman Schwartzkopf and Tommy Franks, is
an Arab American?
Our enemy is horrid, wicked, inhuman. Those are the
adjectives for 9/11, and for 5/11. Not "inhumane," as some of our soldiers
acted at Abu Ghraib. Inhuman. The moral equivalence, and the adjectival
equivalence, needs to end now.
May 1lth is a day we need to remember. That is the
day Muntada al-Ansar showed the beheading of Nick Berg. That is the day we
were reminded of what one British parliamentarian said was the "undiluted
barbarism" we face in this war. That is the day we were reminded of why
we fight. We have shocked, disrupted, killed, and arrested the leadership
of al Qaeda. But al Qaeda, as Corine Hegland wrote in the National
Journal, is a virus more than a corporation. It is an evil virus. And
how do you live with evil? You don't. Yale professor David Gelernter put
it well on my radio show two days ago: "We can't share the earth with pure
evil anymore than we can share the earth with smallpox."
Here is some of what the slaughterers of Nick Berg
said at the time of his beheading: "Tidings of dawn and winds of victory
have begun, for God has honored us with roaring victory in Fallujah...As
for you Bush, dog of the Christians, anticipate what will harm you...you
will only get shroud after shroud and coffin after coffin slaughtered in
this manner." These quotes should be commonplace, to rouse us. I think
most of America is unfamiliar with these words, and so many other
statements of the enemy we face now.
They think they won Fallujah. And they think they are
going to win this war.
They are not going to win this war.
So that they don't win, we need to escalate our
efforts and put an end to their terrorism in Iraq. We need to make clear
that we will now win in Fallujah. And, we need to take out Moqtada al-Sadr
in Najaf.
Earlier this month we bombed al-Sadr's office in
Baghdad. But symbolism does not work with this enemy. Baghdad is not where
al-Sadr was. We need to bomb him in Najaf, where he lives, whether it is
in a mosque or not. A mosque loses its significance once the enemy makes
it a military outpost; and once they do make it a military outpost, we
should treat it as such and take it out!
Once we show them we are intent on winning, then they
will see who the strong horse is; and they will not treat Americans like
this any longer: a) because they will be dead, and b) because we will
discourage further acts of terrorism by our show of seriousness. I take
bin Laden at his word: You show people a strong horse, and you show them a
weak horse, and they will pick the strong horse every time if they can
still pick at all.
Being a strong horse includes how we act at home as
well as abroad. We recently began a military hearing for Army Specialist
Ryan Anderson, from Washington State. As one report put it, Anderson is
"charged with four counts of attempting to provide al Qaeda with
information about U.S. troop strength and tactics, as well as methods for
killing Army personnel." Anderson is not numb, and he is not dumb. He is a
2002 graduate from Washington State University and a convert to Islam.
Anderson is 26 and faces the death penalty. If found guilty, he deserves
it. Nicholas Berg was 26 years old as well and he received a different
kind of death penalty. Berg died because he was an American, doing his
best to help peaceful Arabs and Muslims build a democracy. Anderson may
receive the death penalty because he was trying to help Islamo-fascists
kill as many peaceful Americans as possible. Upon reading both their
biographies, I was drawn again to Plato's Gorgias, where we are
reminded that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit injustice.
It is better to die as Nicholas Berg than it will be to die as Ryan
Anderson, should he receive the death penalty. And it is better to be
Nicholas Berg in death than Ryan Anderson in life.
We learn a great deal from our losses; we learn even
more from loss than from gain. Right after 9/11, the nation was united in
its grief and united in its desire to prevent another attack. We need to
re-summon that moment. We are in a war. And though it may not feel or look
like wartime here, in America, our enemies are not resting. It is wartime
for them. We need to grieve the loss of Nicholas Berg, along with all our
brave men and women overseas. We need to thank them. And, now, more than
ever, we need as Shakespeare wrote to "make medicines of our great
revenge" and fight for them, for ourselves, and for the last, best hope of
Earth.
William J. Bennett, host
of the nationally syndicated radio show
Morning in America,
is the Washington fellow of the
Claremont Institute. He is also a codirector of
Empower America.
