What’s the Real Question in America?

Fred Hiatt has a column in today’s Washington Post that truly has to be read to be believed.

It is his contention that….well, let me just give you his final paragraph.

But any nation asserting such a high calling will be judged by an equally high standard. Are we better than the beheaders, the mass killers, the U.N. peacekeepers raping young girls in the Congo? That’s not close to the right question.

Do we behave as well as we claim, as we should, as we expect of others? That’s the beginning of the right conversation — and why it’s fair to write more editorials about exceedingly mild Koran abuse at Guantanamo Bay than about the unspeakable mass graves of Hilla.

I’ll have to work back through the column to show you how he comes to this conclusion. On its face, it seems a reasonable question to ask: are we as good as we often say we are?

Well, of course we’re not. But that’s not the real question – it’s a bit of a strawman, and an easy one to set up and knock down. After all, asking whether we’re perfect is a gimme and allows Hiatt to hide behind some pretty spurious accusations and laughable statements.

Let’s jump back to the beginning. Hiatt wants to take Vice President Cheney to task for his criticism of American media’s rush to opine about Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib while giving much shorter shrift to real, verified, and massive human-rights abuses elsewhere. Hiatt grants this is true, but gives us a novel reason why this is so.

Of course The Post has published editorials on the subjects Rumsfeld mentioned — mass graves, U.N. abuse, terrorist killings — and on the crimes and misdemeanors of many other foreign actors besides, from Darfur to China to Burma, from Saddam Hussein to Robert Mugabe.

But it’s also true that The Post has published more editorials criticizing Donald Rumsfeld than Abu Musab Zarqawi. That’s partly because, to the extent that editorials are meant to educate or explain, there isn’t all that much to say about Zarqawi’s evil that isn’t evident to most Post readers; and to the extent that editorials are meant to influence, there’s no point in addressing messages to the beheaders of the world.

Did you catch that? You don’t see editorials about Zarqawi because, 1) we already know everything we need to know about him, and 2) he wouldn’t listen to us anyway.

This conclusion assumes two things. First, it assumes that we really do know everything we need to know about people like Zarqawi. That’s a heck of a stretch. I wonder how many people know just who the man is, how long he’s been an active terrorist in Iraq, how long he’d been supported directly by Saddam Hussein, how long he’s been actively working with and for al-Qaeda, or who his terrorist attacks have been targeting. I suspect that if our mass media had reported more widely the documented ties we know existed between Zarqawi and Saddam Hussein, we wouldn’t hear much rubbish about how Hussein had no ties to terrorism. You’ll remember that one of the major reasons the President gave for toppling Hussein were his ties to and active support of terrorists just like Zarqawi.

But that jumps over a more important point. Newspaper editorials really aren’t about delivering facts. That’s what the news articles are suppoed to do. Editorials exist to deliver opinion – their job is to persuade, not to inform. Perhaps Hiatt’s confusion about the role of a newspaper editorial might also explain the problem with so many news articles. If he, a veteran reporter, believes that editorials are supposed to deliver facts, might he also believe that news articles are supposed to deliver opinions? It’s a fair question, I think.

HIs second assumption is one that still baffles me. Does Hiatt honestly believe that the purpose of a critical editorial about Zarqawi is supposed to be to change Zarqawi’s behavior? That’s a ridiculous assumption. If Hiatt actuallybelieves that, then ihs column is even more foolish. If he honestly believes that editorials critical of people like Zarqawi are written to change their behavior, that means that the Post ought to be writing editorials to Zaraqwi, Robert Mugabe, the government of the Sudan, Fidel Castro, Kim Jong-Il, and Kofi Annan every single day in the hopes that their words might forestall the slaughter that these people are either committing themselves, or are condoning with their cooperation. Every day an editorial addresses some piece of frippery like a report that a guard at Gitmo handled a Koran with one hand instead of two is a day when the Post fails to use its great influence to try to prevent thousands more people from dying.

If Hiatt’s second conclusion is right, his newspaper is guilty of terrible apathy. Is that the conclusion he wants us to draw?

Of course not, because, as he writes later, all those deaths aren’t really the important issue. It’s not about them, it’s about us. He follows by noting that the Post has opined critically about all sort of offenses, real and imagined (though he assumes them all real), by the adminstration and addresses the Vice President this way:

Rumsfeld does not accept The Post’s assessment of these events. But even if he did, as I understand his comment, he would point out that none of these offenses, even if accepted as true, is as heinous as filling a mass grave.

But just invoking such a comparison, even implicitly, amounts to a loss for the United States. If we have to defend ourselves by pointing out that we are morally superior to terrorists, it’s a loss.

There you go. If we so much as note that the MSM’s relentless pounding of minor allegations is out of proportion to their relatively scant coverage of the genocide in Darfur, or the beheadings by terrorists, or the gulags that are being run in North Korea, China, and Cuba, then we’ve already lost.

So what’s the point of asking any question at all? By trying to assert that our actions, compared to the actions of so many other countries in the world, don’t deserve the attention they’ve been given, we already concede defeat.

Hiatt steps over the whole issue here by cutting off the only other valid line of debate.

I’m not willing to cut that line off, though. So let’s see why he’s decided it’s a dead-end.

The United States and this administration in particular continually assert the moral right to behave differently than other nations. We will not be bound by the International Criminal Court. We insist that other nations give up their nuclear weapons while we keep our own. We wage war without U.N. Security Council approval. We publish annual report cards on everyone else’s human rights records.

Well, why use facts, when falsehoods and half-truths will work, right? First, we’ve never asserted that we may act differently than any other nation. It’s never happened. We’ve never claimed an “America exemption” for anything we’ve ever done nor have we acted in a way that other nations have acted in the past for reasons far less noble than ours.

Ah, but it’s that claim to noble moral actions that troubles Hiatt, isn’t it? Spreading Democracy isn’t something that makes us good or noble in any way. The problem here is that more countries seem to agree with this administration every day: Georgia, the Ukraine, Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan, just to name the nations that have newly-discovered freedom and think it’s a fine idea for everyone to have what they now have.

But I’ll move on. We aren’t taking part in the ICC because it is an inefficient organzation that’s too easily used to advance a political agenda rather than to mete out impartial justice. That’s something we’ve demonstrated over and over and over again.

We press other nations to give up their nuclear weapons because it is readily apparent that those nations will show no responsibility whatsoever for how it sells or uses those weapons. Hiatt fails to note that there are nations we do not press to give up their nuclear weapons, including our European nemesis France. The issue here isn’t superiority, but stability and responsibility. France may be a nation of effete pantywaists who want to lead the next great superpower, but they’re not going to be dropping a nuke on anyone anytime soon and that’s good enough. Iran on the other hand, is not nearly as sure a bet.

We do indeed go to war without explicit UN approval because the UN does not dicate what our nation, or any other nation, may or may not do. It can not ever supplant the sovereignty of a nation, our or any other. But, again Hiatt is free with the facts. I assume that he refers to our invasion of Iraq with this statement. He has apparently forgotten the daily violations of the cease-fire between the Gulf War I Coalition that gives us, or any Coalition nation, the right to resume hostilities without consulting anyone. He has forgotten the unanimously-approved UN Resolution 1441 that promised “severe consquences” to Hussein. He has forgotten that we were not the only nation that invaded Iraq (including Britain, a nation that was a victim of cease-fire breaches also). He’s not told you about them because….wel…if he did, his point would evaporate into foolishness.

We also publish report cards on other nations’ human rights records because it’s important that it be done by as many groups as possible, as often as possible. My guess here is that we criticize other nations without ever examining ourselves.

And that’s where Hiatt really brings the argument. In his opinion, we’re too eager to criticize others while never criticizing ourselves. That’s the basis for his final paragraphs – the ones I quoted at the beginning of this post.

Again, Hiatt misses something very important. We do criticize ourselves. We criticize ourselves through the democratic process continually. Every single election we hold is a direct examination of the job our elected officials are doing and the direction in which our nation is headed. We are rare among nations in that we do this self-examination on so many different levels of government so often. As a result, our nation does not commit genocide, or build a gulag, or become a tyranny because our people will never allow such a thing to happen.

That is the entire thrust of the Bush Doctrine – free people who form a democratic government similar to ours don’t do the things to which the Vice President wants more attention drawn. If our government were the form of government in the Sudan, there would be no genocide in Darfur. If Kim Jong-Il had to stand for office in a free election, he would never be in the position he’s in right now and millions of North Koreans would be alive today. If Fidel Castro allowed his people the rights that we have here, he’d be out of a job in a month. The irony here is that we’re not telling people they should be just like us – just that they should be free to choose their own destinies.

We are not a perfect nation. We never will be. But it’s an enduring testament that we have the luxury of engaging in the sort of navel-gazing we’ve seen for the last couple years. It’s high praise, I think, to know that the worst sort of “abuse” on wihch our critical media can focus is a kicked book. Hiatt asks us if we’re as good as we could be and the answer if “of course not”. But he also asks if we’re as good as we expect other nations to be and the answer to that is “No. We’re far better”.