Toast

Peggy Noonan's WSJ column from Friday gently nudges our wrists to pick up our glasses and join her in a "toast to American troops, then and now."

Likely prompted more by editorial deadline than news hook, Ms. Noonan opens with a yarn about a hot-air balloon mishap in Normandy. The ballooning party had am emergency landing in the field of a nonogenarian French farmer ("he was like a Life magazine photo from 1938: 'French farmer hoes his field' "):

The farmer said, or asked, "You are American." We nodded, and he made a gesture--I'll be back!--and ran to the house. He came back with an ancient bottle of Calvados, the local brandy. It was literally covered in dust and dry dirt, as if someone had saved it a long time.

He told us--this will seem unlikely, and it amazed us--that he had not seen an American in many, many years, and we asked when. "The invasion," he said. The Normandy invasion.

Then he poured the Calvados and made a toast. I wish I had notes on what he said. Our French speaker translated it into something like, "To old times." And we raised our glasses knowing we were having a moment of unearned tenderness.

Ms. Noonan, the Martha Stewart of the opinion pages, is big on gracious living. Her columns are the rhetorical equivalent of a finely embroidered linen tablecloth she throws over a battered card table when the guests come for dinner.

Continuing:

We know of the broad humanitarian aspects of the occupation--the hospitals being built, the schools restored, the services administered, the kids treated by armed forces doctors. But then there are all the stories that don't quite make it to the top of the heap, and that in a way tell you more. The lieutenant in the First Cavalry who was concerned about Iraqi kids in the countryside who didn't have shoes, so he wrote home, started a drive, and got 3,000 pairs sent over. The lieutenant colonel from California who spent his off-hours emailing hospitals back home to get a wheelchair for a girl with cerebral palsy.

[snip]

And it is not possible that the good people of Iraq are not noticing, and that in some way down the road the sum of these acts will not come to have some special meaning, some special weight of its own. The actor Gary Sinise helps run Operation Iraqi Children, which delivers school supplies with the help of U.S. forces. When he visits Baghdad grade schools, the kids yell, "Lieutenant Dan!"--his role in "Forrest Gump," the story of another good man.

(I wonder if it's just a coincidence that Ms. Noonan chose to highlight the charity work of one of the few actors with winger sensibilities? An acquaintance who worked on CSI: NY a couple of years ago winced at those times when lead actor Sinise would bring his bosom buddy Donald Rumsfeld to the set.

And another fun fact about Mr. Sinise: he headlines the Lt. Dan Band. What's with these winger actors who just can't let that one big role go?)

Moving along.

But - but... one reads these soothing words of no-nonsense, can-do Americana right out of the Office of War Information... and yet some specter is tap-tapping at the windowpane, daring us to look out into the dark. Weren't there some horrible, ghastly pictures of U.S. soldiers torturing Iraqis -

(Gentle cough.) Ah. I had a feeling that might come up.

Some say we're the Roman Empire, but I don't think the soldiers of Rome were known for their kindness, nor the people of Rome for their decency. Some speak of Abu Ghraib, but the humiliation of prisoners there was news because it was American troops acting in a way that was out of the order of things, and apart from tradition. It was weird.

Weird! (Weird?!)

I will slide right by Ms. Noonan's sleight of hand here about Roman Empire/Roman soldiers, there to define the end of the scale of military brutality. (Particularly so for those who have seen The Passion of the Christ.) Ms. Noonan would like to inoculate us from absorbing the full scope of the example that followed: Abu Ghraib.

I would have to agree that people torturing other human beings should be considered "out of the order of things, apart from tradition."

(Aside from Chris Shays, who saw those pictures and pronounced Abu Ghraib a "sex ring.")

How would we conclude, though, that such acts were out of "the order of things"? For one, by how the public reacts to the news. Another way would be by how our leadership reacts:

"Here . . . comes . . . that famous General Taguba—of the Taguba report!" Rumsfeld declared, in a mocking voice. The meeting was attended by Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy; Stephen Cambone, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence; General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (J.C.S.); and General Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, along with Craddock and other officials. Taguba, describing the moment nearly three years later, said, sadly, "I thought they wanted to know. I assumed they wanted to know. I was ignorant of the setting."

In the meeting, the officials professed ignorance about Abu Ghraib. "Could you tell us what happened?" Wolfowitz asked. Someone else asked, "Is it abuse or torture?" At that point, Taguba recalled, "I described a naked detainee lying on the wet floor, handcuffed, with an interrogator shoving things up his rectum, and said, 'That's not abuse. That's torture.' There was quiet."

[...]

I learned from Taguba that the first wave of materials included descriptions of the sexual humiliation of a father with his son, who were both detainees. Several of these images, including one of an Iraqi woman detainee baring her breasts, have since surfaced; others have not. (Taguba's report noted that photographs and videos were being held by the C.I.D. because of ongoing criminal investigations and their "extremely sensitive nature.") Taguba said that he saw "a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee." The video was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it. Such images would have added an even more inflammatory element to the outcry over Abu Ghraib. "It's bad enough that there were photographs of Arab men wearing women's panties," Taguba said.

What a heartening response to the public revelation of what was certainly already known in the West Wing. Worse still the fact that everything about Abu Ghraib was intended and planned - except the homemade videos.

Today, the Mustache of Understanding sends an urgent bulletin from Doha, Qatar, where he stopped by the newsroom of Al Jazeera. Over here! he windmills his arms from six thousand miles away. We're losing the PR war... to Osama bin Laden!

Dive into a conversation about America in the Arab world today, or even in Europe and Africa, and it won’t take 30 seconds before the words “Abu Ghraib” and “Guantánamo Bay” are thrown at you.

Those rude people, throwing examples of U.S. perfidy right in your face. Perhaps Peggy Noonan should take note of the well-traveled Mustache's point here: maybe, just maybe, Abu Ghraib is becoming a new American "tradition" in the wider world. That perhaps she could have tied these two illustrations of American soldiers together - the one on the beaches of Normandy, the other in Abu Ghraib - to note that whatever your hoped-for notions of continuity may be, it is just possible that for billions on the planet, Abu Ghraib is the new "order of things."

Friedman does pose an interesting question:

One thing that has always baffled me about the Bush team’s war effort in Iraq and against Al Qaeda is this: How could an administration that was so good at Swift-boating its political opponents at home be so inept at Swift-boating its geopolitical opponents abroad?

(I am amused by his suggestion that we dig up a talent like Karen Hughes for the job - because her previous efforts at that very task were such a smashing success.)

But the Mustache of Understanding is onto something here. One laments his focus on the PR fixes while short-shrifting the actual causes of such PR "challenges"; one wishes that the Mustache would demonstrate a wee more concern about the fact that Abu Ghraibs actually occur. But with all due seriousness: Why indeed do those so adept at domestic slash-and-burn politics demonstrate such a feeble return on an even feebler effort at making the case for the U.S. abroad?

Could it be, perhaps, that they simply don't care? Or rather, that they care more about other things that make the outward projection of what Ms. Noonan believes to be our "traditions" impossible?

Here's what the Bush Administration cares about:

Pentagon Setting Up Iraq Information 'War Room' as Progress Report Approaches

Shaping the Bush administration's message on the Iraq war has taken on new fervor, just as anticipation is building for the September progress report from top military advisers.

For the Pentagon, getting out Iraq information will now include a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week Iraq Communications Desk that will pump out data from Baghdad - serving as what could be considered a campaign war room.

According to a memo circulated Thursday and obtained by The Associated Press, Dorrance Smith, assistant defense secretary for public affairs, is looking for personnel for what he called the high-priority effort to distribute Defense Department information on Iraq.

The move - requested by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England - comes as administration officials are gearing up for a rash of reports on progress in Iraq and recommendations from the military on troop levels going into next year. The key report will come from Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker.

Ah yes: another demonstration that what the Administration does best, cares about most is Swift-boating the American people. Full stop.

What say you, Mr. Friedman?

If you can’t win a P.R. war against bin Laden, you have no business fighting a real war anymore in Iraq.

That'll do.