U.S.: Kerry, still blaming the U.S. after all these years

The debate has never been settled--not by the mass graves the Germans left behind in Russia, not by the razed villages of Vietnam, and not by the prison at Abu Ghraib. But it never goes away, and in response to the disgusting photos of Americans humiliating Iraqi prisoners, the familiar contours have emerged once more. On the one side, we have President Bush, who vows the abuses "represent the actions of a few people" who will be punished accordingly. Conservative editorial writers at The Washington Times and elsewhere have chimed in, painting the catastrophe as an aberration rather than the norm. The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, The Washington Post's Phillip Kennicott, and other left-leaning writers have pegged responsibility for the deeds on American policy itself. The most confused response comes, however, from John Kerry. On the one hand, the candidate faults "some American troops [who] under some circumstance have engaged in behavior that ... is absolutely unacceptable." On the other, he assures that "if I were president, we'd have a very different set of activities going on in Iraq today"--the none-too-subtle implication being that the abuses amount to an authentic expression of American policy.

Politically and morally, Kerry is treading a very thin line here. For political reasons, the candidate has yet to declare the obvious--that the soldiers in question have committed war crimes and that, whatever official policy may be, there simply can be no extenuation on this count. To begin with, there is no longer room in American political discourse for a voice that says anything remotely critical of "the troops," particularly when that voice belongs to a candidate who still trails his opponent in polls on national security. Indeed, in an interview with The Washington Post, Bush adviser Vin Weber predicted that the public's reaction will be, "Let's not tar all of our troops with this negative image." But the public may not even tar the troops in question.

To understand Kerry's reluctance to focus on the guards, we would do well to cast a glance backward, for this is hardly the first time the public has responded to a wartime revelation of this scope. Having been convicted in 1971 of premeditated murder during the My Lai massacre of 1968, Lieutenant William Calley became an overnight hero. A White House poll found that 79 percent of Americans disagreed with the verdict, and on the day it was handed down, the Nixon team received over 50,000 telegrams demanding clemency. Within days, "The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley" had sold 200,000 copies, and Nixon, citing "public support," sprung Calley from his jail cell.

As it happens, one of the voices raised in Calley's defense belonged to John Kerry. The responsibility for My Lai, Kerry said in congressional testimony, rested not with Calley, but "with the men who designed free fire zones ... with the men who encourage body counts." Lest anyone miss the point, Kerry told an audience at the New York Stock Exchange, "Guilty as Lt. Calley might have been of the actual murder, the verdict does not single out the real criminal. Those of us who have served in Vietnam know that the real guilty party is the United States of America." However mild his current criticisms may sound, the blame Kerry ascribes to the architects of U.S. policy in Iraq differs mainly in tone from the blame he attached to the architects of U.S. policy in Vietnam. Put another way, Kerry's insistence that none of this would have transpired "if I were president" blames the mission that filled Abu Ghraib with prisoners as much as it blames the soldiers who betrayed that mission. Again, this makes perfect political sense. But it hardly provides an adequate response to the moral questions raised at Abu Ghraib.

Echoing as it does the cliché that Vietnam was an "atrocity-producing situation," Kerry's suggestion that Abu Ghraib was more policy than accident implies that the guards were not so much victimizers as victims who deserve a Nuremberg defense. But the notion, popularized then as now by the likes of Kerry and Hersh, is risible. By all accounts, what happened at Abu Ghraib did not reflect official policy--indeed, the source of the photographs was a military investigation into violations of official policy. But even in the unlikely event that the photos reflect practices sanctioned, as Kerry puts it, "up the chain of command," the candidate's blame-the-mission-more-than-the-perpetrators stance relieves the guilty of the burden they so clearly bear, and, to the extent it identifies any moral agency at all, locates it in a supposed policy that--whether measured by the Uniform Code of Military Justice or the Old Testament--it is every soldier's duty to disobey.

Read the rest at The New Republic.

If the heads of Caricom think that Kerry is going to win the election on 11/2/04, they need their heads examined. Ditto to the region's journalists.