What the fuck? Is it some bizarre cognitive disonnance that blinds Bush to the obvious, or something?
Men with boxcutters took over airplanes, and flew them into the WTC. This became the justification for needing space-based missile defense. It was basically conclusively shown that a missile defense system would be totally useless against the new model of international conflict, but for some reason, the attack that proved this to be the case was used as its justification.
Now, we’re destroying Abu Ghraib, in favor of a more modern prison. Sure, there’s a sense that this is now a symbol for both the torture under Hussein’s regime, and the brutality of US policy. But was it a lack of modernization that caused our problems there? Of course not. The problem wasn’t that we weren’t taking humiliating pictures in a modern enough fashion – the problem is that we were using basic, primitive means of torturing prisoners at the behest of the folks running the show. And now that they’ve been caught, they want to destroy the evidence. That’s it. It’s not that Abu Ghraib wasn’t modern enough, it’s that our policy was fundamentally evil. But for some reason, the destruction of Abu Ghraib will placate them, and supposedly make things right somehow. But the only way one can reach that conclusion is to either believe that people are stupid enough to believe that torture will somehow be prevented by altering the place, or believing that the destruction of the symbol will remove the image we created from the hearts and minds of the Iraqis. And to me, that’s idiotic.
What we can do to change the hearts and minds of the Iraqis will take nothing less than removing the administration responsible for this botched policy, and for the American people to show the Iraqis that Bush is NOT our elected leader, and that we do NOT endorse his policies. We must rebuild Iraq, but we simply cannot succeed at this endeavor with the leadership we have in place now. Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. To say that we need a missile defense system in the face of a razor blade is just foolish.
And Bush is no missile defense system.