Now Go Enjoy the Weekend...

The Belmont Club has become my favorite foreign policy blog.

Which is not to say it's the feelgood hit of my blogroll.

Especially this piece.

My first thoughts at the news of the Abu Ghraib abuses, the Taguba Report and the Presidential mea culpa which followed was whether posterity would recall the incident in the same way the Christmas Truce in the first year of the Great War is remembered today. The last grasp at enforcing civilized standards of conduct before the brutality of the trenches coarsened men completely. The fraternization of that first December so alarmed the generals that "special precautions were taken during the Christmases of 1915, 1916 and 1917, even to the extent of actually stepping up artillery bombardments" to prevent its recurrence.

The brass didn't have to worry: it was never to be repeated. After the Somme in the following year, infantrymen on both sides filed saw-teeth into their bayonets to make the thrusts more painful. The history which remembers the Second World War as 'the Good War' forgets how four years of fighting transformed Allies that refused to bomb German cities in 1940 into those that planned thousand plane raids on Hamburg and Dresden in 1945 to rain incendiaries on tens of thousands of Western Europeans as policy. There were no reprimands, only medals, for the B-29 crews that incinerated 100,000 civilians in Tokyo in the raid of March 9, 1945. And the sad balance of probability is that Abu Ghraib will be displaced from the front pages by the next terrorist outrage, the next Bali, the next Madrid, the next 9/11 until we find ourselves wondering why it upset us at all.

While it is important to punish everyone responsible for the outrages at Abu Ghraib, the only effective way to stop the corrupting influences of war is to achieve victory. Read the whole thing.

What does the future hold?

One day Ted Koppel will read, in addition to the names of American soldiers who died in Iraq, the names of friends who will have died in another attack on New York. One day Nicholas de Genovea, the Columbia professor who called for a "million Mogadishus" will understand that it means a billion dead Muslims. And then for the first time, perhaps, they will understand the horror of Abu Ghraib while we all raise our glasses, sardonically like Robert Graves, "with affection, to the men we used to be".

I can't argue with that.

Unfortunately.

And the alterntives are worse.

Posted by Mitch at May 7, 2004 07:40 AM