It’s not a question of infallibility. Everyone makes mistakes. It’s what you do after the mistake that separates the men from the boys.

Columnist Ralph Peters of the New York Post has a good op-ed today, Look Who’s Crying ‘Abuse’. His point is that what sets America apart is that we admit our mistakes, fix them, and keep swinging.

The mistreatment of prisoners is utterly unacceptable. And we haven't accepted it.
As a nation, we've taken responsibility for the tragic actions of a few. Our military has been investigating the misdeeds for months. The initial report was brutally frank. There's no hint of a whitewash. The guilty parties will be called to justice.
Now consider our loudest critics, those governments expressing outrage over the crimes we've been investigating of our own volition.
Start with the Arab world. There is no Arab country - none - in which prisoners aren't treated immeasurably worse than the victims of the sadists in uniform at Abu Ghraib. The torments inflicted on our prisoners came as a shock to us. In the Middle East, torture and even murder remain business as usual behind prison walls.
Can anyone imagine Egypt, or Syria, or Iran, or Saudi Arabia or even Turkey holding public, televised hearings to grill senior government officials about conditions in their prisons?
Without excusing the behavior of those renegade military police in Iraq, isn't there some slight difference between humiliating enemy prisoners and torturing one's fellow citizens to death?

And let's not leave our sanctimonious European friends off the hook. When French intelligence agents blew up a Greenpeace vessel not so long ago, it was treated as little more than a case of littering in the Bois de Boulogne. And when, almost 50 years after the events, a retired French general published a book admitting the extent of French torture and extra-judicial murders in Algeria, the French government's first impulse was to prosecute him for telling the truth.
As an American, I want my country to be held to higher standards - we can live up to them. Proudly. But we don't need any more hypocritical charges from states with no standards at all.
If the Iraqis make a mess of their one great chance, it won't be our fault.

Even human-rights advocates seem vastly more concerned with sticking it to America than with the suffering of millions of prisoners in countries that wouldn't let foreign activists near their prisons. Attacking America makes headlines. Taking on the government of Egypt gets you nowhere. In the quest for renown, justice falls by the wayside.
Human-rights critics were in Iraq because we let them in. Perhaps they should try Saudi Arabia next.
The headlines now wounding us will not soon go away. The media, foreign and domestic, will twist every drop of blood from this story of an American misstep. But no matter how much more there is to come, we Americans will admit our errors and fix them. Then we'll move forward, no less determined to do the right thing.
How many other nations in the world could claim as much?

The only part of that I’d disagree with is “The headlines now wounding us will not soon go away.” I predict that they will. This dead horse has taken about all the beating it can take. Because the Army moved so swiftly to stop, investigate, and punish the abuses, there not really any deeper meaning to the story, no upper echelon scandal. Some troops and probably some of their officers, maybe some CIA, got out of line. Command moved to stop-correct-punish the mistakes the next day. There are plenty of lessons to be learned from the event, but not much that anyone can say that hasn’t already been said about 10,000 times just this week.

Mr. Peters has also written some excellent books, notably Red Army and The War in 2020. Red Army might give you some insight into why Mr. Peters, a former Army intelligence officer, was inclined to be so critical of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for not putting enough boots on the ground. The War in 2020 is simply one of my favorite books and well worth the read, even if it is rather unkind to the Japanese.

Comments

[Paco]

Have you read George Will today? He comes this close (picture me with index and thumb millimeter's apart) from writing that Rumsfeld should resign. In his very eloquent and obsequious manner.

[Pedro]

I made my respnse into a new post. thanks for the heads up.