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TALLAHASSEE - The classic example of chutzpah used to be the apocryphal youth who killed his parents and pleaded for mercy because he was an orphan. Real life has supplanted that with the example of George Bush and Dick Cheney running for re-election despite the cascade of failures in Iraq.
What arrogance, for the people who led us into that to ask us to trust them to lead us out, let alone to trust them with anything else ever again. If John Kerry doesn't throw that in their faces 23 hours a day, then he doesn't deserve to win either.
If Vietnam is still the costliest of wrong wars in terms of lives lost, nothing in our history rivals the enormous damage that Iraq already has inflicted on American foreign policy and prestige, or the potential for deadly repercussions among the billions of people who now view the United States as a particularly sadistic colonialist aggressor.
That they see it that way through the lenses of American cameras is almost as incomprehensible as Donald Rumsfeld's failure to take the prison abuse seriously or the president's apparent incapacity to fire anyone for anything but suspected disloyalty.
To hear the administration's right-wing media claque, it was all the fault of the "liberal" media for broadcasting the pictures. Would they have preferred that some Arab outlet get them first? Once the pictures were taken, it was inevitable that somehow the world would see them.
It is the fact that they were taken in the first place that is so damaging, because it means that the people who did it took pride and pleasure, not shame, in the atrocities they were committing. There are analogies from World War II. Much of the incontrovertible evidence of the Holocaust consists of pictures and films the Nazis themselves made as naked people were lined up beside their mass graves and shot. That the American guards at Abu Ghraib were not deliberately killing people (at least not so far as we know) is an important distinction, but to the Muslim world it is utterly without a difference because sexual degradation is widely regarded there as worse than death. That is, of course, precisely why Saddam Hussein's thugs practiced it.
After weapons of mass destruction turned out to be words of mass deception, Bush, Cheney and their apologists in Congress and the media rationalized that ridding Iraq of its dictator was still enough to make the entire venture worthwhile. So it might have been, if it weren't for so much else: The failure to send in enough troops. A criminal failure, the moral equivalent of manslaughter, to equip those we did send with adequate defenses against roadside bombs and the assorted other weapons of modern guerrilla warfare. The pervasive command failure to properly train and supervise the troops, especially reserve components, so that none would dishonor themselves and their flag.
Americans never thought that Americans could commit war crimes. Then came My Lai, and we all should have known better.
The consequences of failing to remember My Lai are documented not just by the pictures but by the painstaking investigation by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, author of the report that Rumsfeld could not be bothered to read:
" . . . (N)umerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees. This systemic and illegal abuse of detainees was intentionally perpetrated . . . The allegations of abuse were substantiated by detailed witness statements and the discovery of extremely graphic photographic evidence . . .
"I find that the intentional abuse of detainees by military police personnel included the following acts: Punching, slapping, and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet; videotaping and photographing naked male and female detainees; forcibly arranging detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing; forcing detainees to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several days at a time; forcing naked male detainees to wear women's underwear; forcing groups of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed and videotaped; arranging naked male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them; positioning a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head, and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate electric torture; writing "I am a Rapest' (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have forcibly raped a 15-year-old fellow detainee, and then photographing him naked; placing a dog chain or strap around a naked detainee's neck and having a female soldier pose for a picture; a male MP guard having sex with a female detainee; using military working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring a detainee; taking photographs of dead Iraqi detainees."
That was only a partial list.
There is no excuse for any of it, and no remedy that does not go all the way to the top. All the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Correction: Only nine members of the Florida House go back as far as Daniel Webster's speakership. Last week's column erred in saying there were 31.