Tortyrskandalen i perspektiv

Det finns sannerligen mycket att gotta sig åt i media nuförtiden, i varje fall om man gläds åt amerikanska misslyckanden och missgrepp. En militärhistoriker vid namn Victor Davis Hanson skrev igår en intressant artikel i Wall Street Journal om de nu publicerade bilderna på irakiska fångar som torteras av amerikaner. Han skriver:

The Arab world — where the mass-murdering Osama bin Laden is often canonized — is shocked by a pyramid of nude bodies and faux-electric prods, but has so far expressed less collective outrage in its media when the charred corpses of four Americans were poked and dismembered by cheering crowds in Fallujah. The taped murder of Daniel Pearl or a video of the hooded Italian who had his brains blown out — this is the daily fare that emanates now from the television studios of the Middle East

Indeed, if Al-Arabiya and Al-Jazeera could display the same umbrage over mass murder that they do over these recent accounts of shame and humiliation of the detained Iraqis, much of the gratuitous violence of the Middle East would surely diminish. The papers that now allege war crimes are the same state-controlled and censored media that print gleeful accounts of death and desecration of Westerners and promulgate an institutionalized anti-Semitism not seen since the Third Reich.

If a small number of soldiers has transgressed, then let us punish them severely, as well as the officers who either ordered or ignored such reprehensible behavior. But let us also accept that the reaction to this incident is indicative of larger moral asymmetries that are the burdens of the West when it goes to war, a culture that so often equates the understandable absence of perfection, either moral, political, or military, with abject failure — a fact not lost on our enemies.