Appallingly, yet predictably, the it's-never-our-fault brigades of the right have now set out after some of the administration's critics with respect to the Abu Ghraib disaster. On CNN's Capitol Gang last Saturday night, The National Review's Kate O'Bierne and a backbenching Republican member of Congress both lit into House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi for remarks -- her speculation about a possible attempt within the government to cover up the prison revelations -- that supposedly gave aid and comfort to our enemies in a time of war.
Going them one better, if it can be put that way, Vice President Dick Cheney came out Sunday morning and announced that people should just "get off" Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's "case" because he's the best the country has ever had in the job. That even conservative Republican Senator Lindsay Graham rebutted this with brio on Meet the Press on Sunday gives you an idea of the statement's moral seriousness.
Both are examples of more bluster of the sort with which we've become familiar. But which side has, in fact. given aid and comfort to the enemy? Which side diverted attention from the just war against the Taliban mullahs and Osama bin Laden so it could go off and invade a country that, however horrifying its regime, had committed no act of belligerence and had not, by the best estimates, been a serious player in the terror game for a decade? Which side ignored all the evidence that didn't support its plans, and which side lied to the world and to the American people about the reasons for their war?
Which side has brought American credibility to an unimaginably low point in modern world history -- to a point from which, it is now no exaggeration to say, it could take two decades to recover fully? Which side, intentionally refusing to listen to anyone who warned that rebuilding Iraq would be an arduous job, let the current disaster happen, ensuring that another generation or two of young Muslim men would hate America even more? Which side, now, has spent the last year-and-a-half doing almost nothing but -- in its arrogant and inept and ideologically hidebound way -- giving aid and comfort to the enemy?
The administration has been temporarily chastised, and it now vows that it will get to the bottom of Abu Ghraib and share with Congress the even worse atrocities that are about to be exposed. But what's instructive here are not the concessions being made once its back is up against the wall. What's instructive is that Bush officials at first tried the old reflex of dodge and accuse.
The Pentagon had the photos that were to be aired on 60 Minutes II; it sat on them hoping the matter would go away. Even on so simple a matter as when the president was told about the problem, we can't get a straight answer: Press aide Scott McClellan told The Washington Post last week that Bush couldn't recall when he'd been informed of the problem. One finds oneself actually hoping that's a lie, because if Bush truly can't remember, then he's dumber than we thought.
And still, out of the other side of their mouth, they keep playing offense: Criticism is unpatriotic; they know what they're doing, and the rest of us should just trust them; and, most of all, remember, we're at war. Yes, we're at war, all right -- a war they started, a war they have catastrophically mishandled, a war that has turned literally the entire world against the United States. For Bush officials to continue to use the "we're at war" excuse as a way of trying to deflect criticism and argue that the rest of us should rally around them is beyond belief -- we're at war, it's a lot worse than we thought, and even though that's our fault, it's all the more reason that you, citizen, have to stay with us and not get any funny ideas. It's the moral equivalent of the classic definition of chutzpah, which involves the man who murders his parents and then begs the court's mercy because he's an orphan.
This administration will go through the motions of punishing people for Abu Ghraib; Donald Rumsfeld may even resign. But as Democratic Senator Carl Levin indicated on Meet the Press, a Rumsfeld resignation will fix nothing. It took more than one person to make this colossal mess, and it will take many, many more people -- pundits and intellectuals who want to atone for their shabby credulity a year ago, and Republican officials who want to see actual standards of honesty and morality observed for a change -- to get us out of it.
Michael Tomasky is executive editor of The Prospect.
