Where Have We Come To?
Jean Provost
05/19/04 "ICH" -- We took a severe blow on September 11, 2001. But an often heard comment that day was to the effect -- “we can’t let this affect the way we live! If we do, then the terrorists will have won.” We have changed, in remarkable ways, since that sad day.
We live in fear – although the statistical odds against any individual citizen being harmed by a terrorist, while within our borders, is infinitesimally low.
Our level of tolerance for a significant slice of our national population has eroded – probably a foreseeable byproduct of our demonization of the extremists implicated in the attack on us.
We became the world’s “bully on the bayou” with our insistence that only we were right, that we could act peremptorily and with impunity against any nation we viewed as “supporting” terrorism, (no-matter how we were defining that term at that particular moment), and we exercised our ascendancy by denigrating the U.N., by ignoring the counsel of long standing allies, by characterizing any dissent, here at home, as being “unpatriotic.” In short, we adopted a modus operandi of “might makes right,” and “my way or the highway.”
We characterized our foes as “enemy combatants” – with no right to Geneva Convention protection - and we imprisoned many, incommunicado – without charges, without access to lawyers, without any due process. It was only recently, after about two years of incarceration, that two early teen-aged boys were released. Until the time of their release, we had feared they represented a significant long-term threat to the security of the United States. Their side of the story was never heard, at least publicly.
On baseless pretexts, we invaded a country not implicated in the September 11 atrocity, albeit one ruled by a despot (and a bully also, in a more localized bayou). Our technological superiority, coupled with that particular enemy’s loss of half of its military strength during the ten years between 1992 and 2002 from our persistent aerial attacks and an embargo against its imports, yielded us a quick and decisive military victory. The enemy’s casualties, both military and civilian, have been quite high, though we have not made any effort to count or assess that effect, at least formally.
Our subsequent occupation of that land has not yielded any victory in the battle for the minds of men. Instead, our occupation, with its attendant effort to put down a persistent and broad based insurgency, has led to increasing brutality in our efforts to quell it – with more bloodshed and destruction.
Our dissatisfaction with intelligence being gained from internees, most of whom were not charged with any wrong-doing, has now led to documented acts of brutality by us, perpetrated on “them” – prisoners under our custody and care. “Softening up” techniques that have been employed to “prepare” detainees for interrogation, clearly violate international law and the precepts of the Geneva conventions. They reflect man’s inhumanity to man. They would not pass muster here in the United States, if anyone sought to use them against even one convicted of the most heinous of crimes.
And yet there are those that maintain that these acts of brutality may be marginally legal; that the do-gooders, who seek to bring them into the harsh light of public scrutiny, themselves are “outrageous;” that the victims deserve this treatment since they’re probably guilty of something, anyhow; and that the reported brutalities are no worse than a college fraternity hazing, as one media personality rushed to say. Psychological stress is not torture, these folk say, but their parents, and most other Americans, certainly held that “brainwashing” of American POWs did indeed constitute illegal, reprehensible and improper torture.
With our “do as I say, not as I do” posturing of late, we have lost the moral high ground we had painstakingly won, by our leadership and example over the past 50 years.
We certainly have been changed by the September 11 atrocity – and our reactions to it. To paraphrase Walt Kelly’s memorable Pogo, “we has met the threat, and he is us.”
Copyright: Jean Provost. <jjpjjp@verizon.net> |
