Nabobs of NABA

It was an experiment. The Initiative represented the government's interest in not only controlling the otherworldly menace, but in harnessing its power for our own military purposes. The considered opinion of this council is that the experiment has failed. ...

The demons cannot be harnessed, cannot be controlled. It is therefore our recommendation that the project be terminated. ... The Initiative itself will be filled in with concrete. Burn it down, gentlemen. Burn it down and salt the earth.

When you have to resort to the NABA defense, you're in bad shape. That's NABA as in "Not As Bad As."

We've heard a lot of this lately from the nabobs of NABA in the Bush administration. The American abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, we are reminded, was Not As Bad As the abuses committed there by Saddam Hussein back in the day. The lawlessness of Guantanamo Bay, the president insists, indignantly, is Not As Bad As the kind of thing Joe Stalin used to do. And while more than 100 prisoners have been beaten and tortured to death in American custody during the past three years, that's Not As Bad As the death toll from the terrorist attacks of 9/11 -- the event that we have taken as license to adopt means that are almost, but perhaps Not (quite) As Bad As the means of the terrorists we rightly condemn as immoral.

I do not merely concede these points, I heartily embrace them. Take the whole sordid affair -- the Lynndie photoshoot, the torturing to death of innocents and adversaries alike, the "extraordinary rendition" of unknown hundreds or thousands on the slenderest of suspicions -- and it still doesn't put us in the same league as the A-list All-Stars of Evil.

But, good God, is this what America is now reduced to? Do we really have to go all the way over to Stalin or Saddam to find an example of someone whose behavior is reassuringly worse than our own? How are we supposed to maintain a shred of pride in our nation or in ourselves as a people when the best we can say for ourselves is that we're Not As Bad As the worst people we can think of? Do we really need Stalin in the class to blow the curve so we can pass this course?

We've become like Lot, the troglodytic drunk who, while screwing his own daughters, took comfort that at least he was Not As Bad As his old friends and neighbors back in Sodom.

Former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter yesterday became the latest to call for the closing of America's shameful prison camp in Guantanamo, Cuba:

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has called for his country to shut down the Guantanamo Bay prison to demonstrate its commitment to human rights.

"The U.S. continues to suffer terrible embarrassment and a blow to our reputation ... because of reports concerning abuses of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo," Carter said after a two-day human rights conference at his Atlanta center.

Carter is right. Or at least almost right. It is not really the "reports concerning abuses of prisoners" that are the cause of America's desperate, shameful appeal to the NABA defense, it is the actual abuse of prisoners.

We're supposed to be the good guys. Detention without charge, torture, abuse, extraordinary rendition, disregard for the Geneva Conventions and the unadorned murder of prisoners are not things that the good guys should tolerate, let alone actively embrace.

Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib II and the entire apparatus of secret American torture cells around the world are premised on the idea that because we are fighting demons we must adopt their demonic methods.

That experiment has failed. The demons cannot be harnessed, cannot be controlled. Guantanamo, like Abu Ghraib, has become a national disgrace.

Burn it down, gentlemen. Burn it down and salt the earth.

Comments

[Luke Francl]

Props for perhaps the first time I've seen troglodyte used to refer to some actually living in a cave.

[Scott]

Where was the blockquote at the top from?

I forgot who it was who said, when talking about how modern Israel treats the Palestinians, "the question isn't are we [Israelis] different from [an oppressor, I forget which], but are we different enough?"

[Captain Slack]

Where was the blockquote at the top from?

It took me a moment to make the connection, but the references to demons and the Initiative make me think it's from Buffy.

[U&A]

Very well said!

As you say, we're supposed to be the good guys and stand as examples to the rest of the world, and I fear that on that score both our countries are failing rather spectacularly.

I'm British and while our troops haven't been involved in the various abuses to anywhere near the same extent as US forces, our hands are nowhere near as clean they should be. There have been similar, albeit a *lot* fewer, reports of abuses by our troops and reports of extraordinary rendition flights using British airports as stopping off points, for example.

Scott, I believe the quote at the start was from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

[wintermtue]

I think there's a difference between "Iraq today is not as bad as Iraq under Hussain" and "Guantanamo Bay is not as bad as Auschwitz".

In the former case, the point is that things have improved since the Coalition moved in. Maybe not as much as we'd like, and maybe not as much as it should have, but there has been improvement, which we can hope will continue. It may not be the best argument, but there is some merit to it.

In the latter case, there is nothing more than apologetics of the worst kind.

[Edward Liu]

This was always one of the straw-man arguments that hacked me off. I assumed that it was a given that America was "better" than the likes of Saddam Hussein, Adolf Hitler, and Josef Stalin. I thought the fact that we were better than Saddam was one of the ways the neocons justified going to war in the first place.

As for the blockquote, it is from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, although I have to admit my suspension of disbelief is strained by it. Given the history of missile defense, the Sgt. York anti-aircraft weapon, and the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, I'd think that the reaction of the military to the failure of the Initiative would be to redefine the goalposts lower while throwing even more money at it.

[Mnemosyne]

In the former case, the point is that things have improved since the Coalition moved in. Maybe not as much as we'd like, and maybe not as much as it should have, but there has been improvement, which we can hope will continue. It may not be the best argument, but there is some merit to it.

I think it kind of depends on your definition of "improvement." Is it an improvement when you get kidnapped and murdered by freelance thugs instead of the government? Is it an improvement when women are now forced to wear the veil in public or risk a beating from Islamist thugs who were (for better and for worse) persecuted under Saddam's reign?

Frankly, it's like a surgeon arguing that amputating the wrong limb wasn't that bad of a mistake, because you were expecting to wake up missing a limb anyway, right?

[E. Nonee Moose]

Carter is right. Or at least almost right. It is not really the "reports concerning abuses of prisoners" that are the cause of America's desperate, shameful appeal to the NABA defense, it is the actual abuse of prisoners.

Carter knows this... he was just trying to be diplomatic.

[wintermute]

I think it kind of depends on your definition of "improvement." Is it an improvement when you get kidnapped and murdered by freelance thugs instead of the government? Is it an improvement when women are now forced to wear the veil in public or risk a beating from Islamist thugs who were (for better and for worse) persecuted under Saddam's reign?

I think that if anyone uses the NABA argument in that case, then they obviously believe there hase been an improvement. I wasn't meaning to imply that there undeniably has been an improvement; just that an argument that things are NABA the same situation before a certain action was taken is of a different order than saying "Well, Bush is NABA Stalin, so we should be glad to have him for a president".

As to whether there has been an improvement, that clearly depends on what markers you measure it by. On the plus side, the economy is stronger, water and electricity and telephones are more universally available, there's more public free speech, fewer deaths (In January, there were approximately one-quarter the civilian deaths in Iraq as there were in January 2002, for example), there may be more cases of women being beaten for not wearing a hijab, but there are also more cases of women being able to work.

I won't bother to list negatives, because I'm sure you already know plenty of them. It's a complex situation, with strong arguments on both sides of the "things have improved" argument, and I wasn't wanting to suggest that everything in Iraq had gotten better, just that I can understand the argument, and at least half-way accept it.

[Ray]

Just on a couple of your positives - electricity production in Iraq still hasn't reached the levels it was at before the war, and any count of civilian deaths must also factor in the tens of thousands of (extra) people who died as a result of the invasion. (I'm not trying to attack you, I know you're not claiming everything is much better)

[Darryl Pearce]

...I guess we "can't handle the truth" or it least that's what our beneficent, far-too-right republican neo-con's will tell us. Of course, they'll lie to us for our own good.

...just like the abusive people their actions (and works) show them to be.

[Mike Russo]

Just as a heads-up that the "over 100 beaten or tortured to death" figure isn't quite correct; the 108 number one hears bandied about actually sweeps up everybody who's died in US custody, including those killed by insurgents or who've died of natural causes. A more accurate figure for confirmed homicides (which the Army hasn't found to be justified) is around 30; of course, some of those justified homicides and natural cases deaths are probably whitewashed murders, so the number is almost certainly a bit higher, perhaps 35 or 40.

That niggle aside, however, I completely agree with the substance of the post.

[Lisa L]

RE NABA: Excellent post as usual. And thanks for the Buffy reference.

[Patrick Nielsen Hayden]

Of course, just as an added realistic detail, the government ultimately didn't actually fill the underground Initiative headquarters with concrete. Quite the contrary, as we see in season 7, they cheaped out and simply let it all rot in place.

Personally, I'm enjoying our host's ability to frame such diverse political and religious matters with Buffy references. I think this could continue to work for some time.

[Mabus]

I'm a little disturbed by that myself. I enjoy Buffy, but I've always thought of it as an un-intellectual pasttime--something I watch when I want to not think hard for a while.

On the other hand, considering some of the things I've said here, maybe I'm better off not thinking so hard.

[Fred]

The Buffy quote is from "Primeval" -- the next-to-last episode in Season 4 in which she goes all Neo on Adam.

Mike -- Good point on the 108 figure, though I'm guessing the official 30 is a lot further off the mark.

Wintermute -- Re: "there may be more cases of women being beaten for not wearing a hijab, but there are also more cases of women being able to work." Saddam is gone. Yay for that. But regarding the status of women, Saddam was not the Taliban, or the Saudis, or even the LaHayes. It's not like the man was a feminist, but he was a secular tyrant with delusions of modernity. Women who managed to avoid the man himself, or his sons, were certainly able to work (consider, for example, "Dr. Death").

Re: water and electricity, that situation is undeniably, measurably, worse than it was even under sanctions. Latest I read was 15 percent of the country has reliable electricity, and only 4 percent of the capital, That's not an improvement. But, yes, Saddam is gone, freedom of speech, the first elections since the British mandate -- that's all in the plus column.

[Cythraul]

We're supposed to be the good guys.

Those in power would maintain you still are, by Ebert's Diagnosis:

"The Holocaust is the most tragic and deadly outburst of the once-useful, now-dangerous human trait of tribalism, in which we are right and you are wrong because we are we, and you are not. In recent years in Serbia, in Africa, in Cambodia, in Northern Ireland, the epidemic is alive and well."
- Roger Ebert, review (1999) of The Last Days

(emphasis mine)

.... oh dear. Have I just hit Godwin's Law?

[Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little]

Excellent post.

Us aspiring writers, we do tend to look at bookshelves and say, "How did this dreck get published? I could write something better than that!" Which is an encouraging thought, but a limiting one if one aims no higher than just writing slightly better dreck than what's on the shelves today.

In governing as in writing, "Crap plus one" is not a worthwhile aim.

[Mnemosyne]

the economy is stronger

Since everyone else got to the rest of the list before me .... 60% unemployment is a "stronger" economy?

I'm not saying that Iraq under Saddam was a great place to live, particularly if you were a devout Muslim or came to the notice of the government. But it was a secular government, and women had more equality there than in most of the Middle East. They could hold jobs, get educations, drive cars, walk down the street without wearing a veil, vote, etc. That's far more than they can do in the countries of our allies and good friends, the Saudis and Kuwaitis.

All that has changed. And while we can sit in our safe little houses and apartments 10,000 miles away and smugly say, "They'll thank us for what we did someday," the fact is that, right now, for ordinary people, life in Iraq is much WORSE on a day-to-day basis than it was under Saddam.

You may consider that a necessary evil. But it doesn't lessen their daily suffering, and it's a suffering that the United States has directly caused. You could argue we had some moral responsibility for what people suffered under Saddam's reign because of Bush I's actions after Gulf War I, but we have 100 percent responsibility for what's going on now, because we invaded, overthrew their government, removed their infrastructure and law enforcement, and replaced it with the U.S. Army and Marines.

[Christopher]

What bothers me is that anybody has to explain why the NABA argument is stupid in the first place.

Shouldn't anybody with an ounce of sense see through it? I mean, Jeffery Dahmer wasn't as bad as Hitler, either.

Anyway, what bothers me about the torture and shit is that Bush's post-invasion plan relied heavily on the support of Iraqi citizens, so each of these atrocities has eroded the Bush administration's ability to execute its plan for Iraq.

[chris]

What bothers me about the torture and shit is the torture and shit. Is that naive?

[cjmr]

What bothers me about the torture and shit is the torture and shit. Is that naive?

If it is, I'm happy to join you in your naivety!

[gmanedit]

Read up on depleted uranium. No way are Iraqis better off. And they won't be for 4.5 billion years. (P.S. The stuff spreads around the globe.)

[gmanedit]

Read up on depleted uranium. No way are Iraqis better off. And they won't be for 4.5 billion years. (P.S. The stuff spreads around the globe.)

[Sky-Ho]

Republicans tend to grade on the curve, allowing them to make preposterous statements like they do.

Democrats tend to grade themselves against actual standards. While, sometimes, they pick pretty low standards, at least one knows where they stand vs Republicans which are, seemingly, always looking for someone "worse" against with which to evaluate their actions.

[Nathaniel Hellerstein]

The "NABA" defense? Good phrase! I call it "Lesser-Evilism"; the belief that the lesser of two evils is _therefore_ good. Lesser-Evilism does not require that you be good; merely that you be other than somebody else who is worse.

The trouble with Lesser-Evilism is that one can never be sure that the lesser of two evils is lesser, but you can always be sure that it is evil. Thus Lesser-Evilism tends to devolve to Evilism, and NABA becomes JABA.

[Fred]

Nathaniel --

Reminds me of the joke about the two hikers, the punchline of which is "I don't have to run faster than the bear, I just have to run faster than YOU."

[Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little]

Nathaniel - "Thus Lesser-Evilism tends to devolve to Evilism, and NABA becomes JABA." - Yes. The slippery slope eventually slides down to "Hey, we're not as bad as Hitler; our euthanization methods are much more humane. And at least we don't manufacture Iraqi-skin lampshades."