I had one of my worst responses to a comment ever today (and the competition is fierce), so of course I feel that I must turn that response into a diary. Actually, maybe it's more of a jeremiad.
Yesterday, many Kossacks blithely crossed the "Hanoi Jane" line with respect to Iraq and some crossed the "Michael Savage" line with respect to George Bush. The reason that Jane Fonda is still a name that can whip up conservatives is not that she opposed the war in Vietnam, many did. It's that she was filmed looking approvingly at weapons used to kill Americans. In approving overwhelmingly of the shoe-throwing by al-Zeidi -- not "understanding why one would do it," not finding it humorous, but by approving of it -- many Kossacks put themselves in the same position as Jane Fonda, who at least later invoked the excuse that she was bamboozled by the Vietnamese into taking such action.
Today, we've started a human rights campaign to prevent al-Zeidi's torture. It might be a good thing if it were well-intentioned, well-informed, and in keeping with a long Kossack tradition of such actions.
But it's not. It's unprincipled.
Got your attention? There's more explanation and abuse below.
The "Michael Savage" line is the one where you publicly wish for the death or injury of a disliked political figure. You can find some of that in the comments to my diary from yesterday and that of many others. Before you deny that Kossacks have been saying such things, please do read the comments.
Now, today comes a well-intentioned diary, whose support for human rights and knowledge of the situation in Iraq I don't doubt. D-day asks that people petition Bush to forgive his attacker. I think that this is harmless but also pretty ineffectual. Bush probably won't do -- and arguably shouldn't do it, for reasons outlined below -- and if he did so then Maliki might be forced to take a harder line against the Sadrists than he would otherwise, both to show his strength and to prove that he is not a U.S. puppet.
(The ironic thing, of course, is that Maliki is not a U.S. puppet. He is closer to Iran -- something you don't often read in the papers. He is just biding his time for the U.S. to leave, at which point he hopes to be prepared for the expected four-way Gotterdammerung between his pro-Iranian Shia, Moqtada al-Sadr's nationalist Shia, the nationalist Sunnis, and the anti-Iraqi-nationalist (but pro-Kurdish-nationalist Kurds.)
Within the dominant Shia community, there is a struggle going on right now between Maliki's group and Sadr's group. Neither are admirable. Both have committed grave abuses -- although Sadr, the patron of the guy that Kossacks have been cheering, has probably committed more against Americans than has Maliki -- and those abuses are just a warmup for the ones that will come after we leave.
In this intra-Shia conflict, Kossacks have been taking the side of Sadr's guy, al-Zeidi, for pretty much the worst possible reason: because we like that he insulted our President. People here sing of his anti-imperialist motives -- although everyone with any support in Iraq is anti-imperalist -- as justifications for his actions, without recognizing that at a minimum he is also acting out of pro-Sadrist motives that are far less benign. We are doing this because we don't take the trouble to see this incident through the lens of Iraqi politics as opposed to American politics. We have adopted him on the grounds that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" -- blind to whether he is a friend worth having and to the effects of this "adoption."
For what it's worth, I think that a good case can be made that Sadr should be running Iraq rather than Maliki, once the dust settles, though I don't like either faction and don't think my opinion -- or that of any American -- should count for much. Our role should be to make reparations and to facilitate Iraq being the best society it can become.
That is not what our cuddly shoe-thrower wants, though. He wants to stir up public agnger against Maliki. Bush is secondary in this fight. He could hurt Maliki more by throwing the shoe at Bush than at Maliki because it puts Sadr's anti-imperialist arguments squarely ath the forefront, because no one likes imperialism except maybe some likely-soon-to-be-disappointed Kurds, but the impact of the throw was aimed at Maliki.
So when we Kossacks dip our oars into the waters of taking sides in an Iraqi civil war, we are being manipulated by someone who we very likely would not end up liking if we better thought it through. We're doing it out of fundamental ignorance of Iraqi politics. We are acting, in other words, like colonialists and imperialists have long acted.
Now, does that mean that I think he should be tortured? No. I don't -- although I suggested early on what now appears likely to be true: that the Iraqis were beating the crap out of him and that he was transferred to an American army base for his protection. (Maliki also approved this because he'd like Americans to share complicity in whatever happens to al-Zeidi. Unlike our President, the man is no fool.) Why can't we just release him? Because that is taking sides -- and, it's taking sides against the faction that wants us to take the time that we evidently think we need to get out of there safely.
The Kossack and netroots adoption of the anti-torture cause in this case would be less offensive, less smacking of cherry-picking abuses and adopting someone because he did what we could not in humiliating Bush, if it were part of a longstanding successful campaign here to get people to take part in Amnesty International letter-writing campaigns on behalf of political prisoners. Would that such a successful long-standing campaign existed on this site! But, it doesn't. (I hope that perhaps this prompts one. Certainly some Kossacks do have such a track record and favor Bush making a statement solely for pure reasons. I exclude them from being targets of this rant.) Most of us are not clamoring in favor of writing on behalf of this al-Zeidi because we are actively anti-torture, but because we like what he did, and his getting away with it would further deepen Bush's humiliation. That's not acting on principle, it's acting out of schadenfreude.
Frankly, my sympathy would tend to go elsewhere. I understand that there is good reason for Sadr to distrust the American willingness to leave Iraq on the timetable specified by the SOFA agreement -- and General Odierno has given him increased reason for that doubt with his recent statements. But I hope and believe that President Obama is going to push Odierno to fulfill our SOFA obligations. That is going to be a damn hard task. Hell, getting Hillary and James Jones on board may be a hard task. But that is what has to be done to get us out of Iraq.
What al-Zeidi has done is to make Obama's job twice as hard. Now, the voices who say that we can't leave because our enemies (that's Sadr) will take the country over from our allies (that's Maliki, and he's actually Iran's ally) and we'll lose all of our gains. That last part is a load of crap, but that is what Obama has to deal with. I wish that the Sadrists would just be patient and let Obama get our troops out by the SOFA timetable, but that is less likely now. Their impatience -- which may be calculated -- makes the provocation of U.S. troops in Iraq more likely to remain under Obama, because Obama has to be concerned for domestic political reasons about looking too weak.
So, in other words, when you are cheering the actions of the shoe tosser, you are cheering along with Bush and Cheney and everyone else who wants to see either us mired in Iraq indefinitely or for Obama and the Democrats to take the blame for our failures, ideally after a nice big intra-party fissure. Once you know who your allies in cheering are, it doesn't seem like quite such a light-hearted romp, does it?